Sound check: Put a face to these familiar Indian voices
You’ve heard these artists before. They’ve voiced your cartoons, movies and anime. Now, AI and other villains are threatening to silence them
Who gave Dobby his squeaky charm, Yoda his gravelly wisdom, or Joker his quiet menace when they spoke to Indian audiences? Vinod Kulkarnni. Who voices some of your fav anime characters when they cross the border into India? Suvela Sharma. Whose booming voice signals film awards night? Darrpan Mehta’s. Who is the voice behind that Santoor, Malabar Gold or Himalaya ad? Shreya Shah. Some of the most trusted and familiar voices of our time belong to artists who might pass us, unrecognised, on the street.
The voice-over industry used to be an oligopoly – a handful of people hogging the mic (and doing terrible American accents on customer-service call recordings). But this is the decade of plenty. More people found their voice, literally, while they were stuck home in the pandemic. And better tech means a good voice can, again literally, phone it in and pick up a paycheque.
So how come voice artists are still not getting their due? Take a look.
Sense the discord
“People take the art of speaking well for granted; it’s the most underrated life skill,” says Darrpan Mehta, 50, one of the industry’s most sought-after artists. Think of a Mercedes ad, designed to drift you off into your dream life. Or an Amazon sale ad aimed to trigger FOMO. Or a customer service recording that makes “Your call is important to us” sound believable 12 minutes into waiting. Now, think of all these voices coming from the same human, the delivery style evoking a different emotion each time. That’s it. That’s the magic.
And still, voice acting tends to be the neglected child. For e-learning modules or short ads, performers get a paltry ₹4,000 or more per finished minute. “Experienced artists make ₹5,000 to ₹25,000 for TV commercials, dubbing, or long-format content,” says Shreya Shah, 30, who’s done voice work for seven years. In India, voice artists don’t receive royalties. Their work is reused endlessly across TV, OTT, radio, and social media for a one-time fee, leaving the community insecure and underpaid.
Vinod Kulkarnni, 59, has clocked several decades in the business. He voiced Dobby in two Harry Potter films; played Joker and Riddler in Batman movies; and recorded more than 1,500 episodes of Popeye the Sailor Man. “I’ve dubbed in Malayalam, Bengali, Assamese and more; but I don’t do it anymore,” he says. “Many regional artists are losing their jobs to AI. To protect their livelihood, us multilingual actors follow AVA (Association of Voice Artists) regulations and refuse to dub in more than two languages.”
Flat notes
Voice artists are why many debutant actors (even Deepika Padukone and Rani Mukerji) sound seamlessly like they belong, even though their actual voices hadn’t yet adapted to Bollywood. When animated or dubbed films hit big, it’s the same voice artists who are cast aside in favour of recognisable screen actors in the sequels. Sanket Mhatre, who voiced Deadpool in the first film, was replaced by Ranveer Singh in Deadpool 2.
Kulkarnni shaped the voice of Baloo and Kaa in the 1989 The Jungle Book series, but the 2016 live-action film cast big names such as Irrfan Khan and Priyanka Chopra for its Hindi dub. Voice artists might receive anything from ₹30,000 to ₹2 lakh for a film, celebrities make many times that. “It’s humiliating,” Kulkarnni says.
And they don’t benefit from the recall value that film actors get. “We have to keep working to be remembered,” says Suvela Sharma, 30, the voice of Little Singham in English and Hindi, Blossom from The Powerpuff Girls on Netflix, and Nobara Kugisaki from the anime Jujutsu Kaisen among others. “Staying relevant when you cannot be seen is a big challenge,” she says.
Vocal triumph
They’re all concerned about a new player that has entered the game: AI. Bots can now scrape enough voice samples (human, animal, movie alien) to generate monologues without the use of a human. It’s convenient enough to make a studio drop a human performer. But to a listening audience, something sounds not-quite-right. “The human voice can convey emotions in a way that feels raw and authentic,” says Shah. “AI can mimic tone and pitch, but it’s the feelings and expressions that make human voices stand out.”
Many artists are already selling the full rights to their voice to AI companies for as little as ₹2 or ₹3 lakh. All it takes is a 90-minute session of recording innocuous phrases and words, for a machine to capture the person’s vocal range, mannerisms, and emotional cues to mix-and-match endlessly and generate a speech, slogan, or even a sexually-explicit voice note. No one’s ready. There are no laws, no safeguards. No way to reclaim what has been sold.
Veterans like Mehta, founder and organiser of India Voice Fest, and Kulkarnni are rallying the voice-artist community to protect their asset and be recognised more fairly. Last month, Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine sold their voice rights to the AI Podcast Company ElevenLabs. And about a week ago, Warner Music Group signed a licensing deal with Suno allowing AI-generated music using participating artists’ voices and likenesses. It means that Ed Sheeran, Twenty One Pilots, and Dua Lipa could opt into the program. And yet again, no one knows how actual voice artists will fare.
From HT Brunch, December 06, 2025
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