MTV India launches BotHard - India's first AI-powered rapper

MTV - BotHard

Rap is now the mainstream sound across the world. But in India, it was just not able to compete against the monopoly of Bollywood music.

With MTV Hustle 2.0, India’s first rap talent reality show, we let people experience the Indian rap universe. Not by inviting them to listen to rap, but by getting them to make it with BotHard, an AI-based rapper that could rap on just about any word you send him.

BotHard burst on to the scene by dissing a few Indian and international rappers. Some of the Indian rappers hit back at BotHard with their own diss tracks. He even made an appearance on MTV Hustle 2.0 where he challenged the contestants, the squad bosses, and even the judge Badshah, with his sass and class. BotHard also dropped raps on celebs, influencers, brands, and showed off his talent at college festivals. Within no time, everyone wanted to give it a try. People could just send any word to BotHard on Instagram, WhatsApp, or Google Assistant, and BotHard would generate a rap on that word and send it back.

Built on the GPT3 platform, BotHard emulates rhyme schemes and patterns. So, any word you send BotHard, it uses that to generate lyrics in these rappers’ styles, which is then converted to vocals using a text-to-speech engine. Those vocals are then stitched on to a rap beat, while the lyric video is generated in parallel to give the final track.

This campaign resulted in 350,000+ rap videos being created. MTV Hustle Season 2.0 garnered 2 billion views and saw 9x growth in views on digital from Season 1.