Microdramas are all the rage these days, and nearly every company in the attention economy is developing products to capitalize on this opportunity, whether it’s dedicated microdramas apps, social media giants (TikTok and Instagram), or streaming services (Peacock, Amazon Prime, India’s JioHotstar).
Character.AI, which lets you chat with customized AI avatars, is also tapping into this emerging market by creating its own microdramas with AI characters. But there’s an interesting twist on the company’s core product that allows users over the age of 18 to chat with characters from these shows, ask questions, and role-play different storylines.
The company will initially launch three microdramas: a romance series called “Last Summer,” a horror show titled “The Nighttime Game,” and a Hunger Games-style survival microdrama titled “Eden Fall.”
According to Character.AI, these dramas are created using AI production tools, with the long-term goal of allowing users to create their own characters and series.
“Starting with a studio-driven model, the c.ai series allows our production teams to develop formats, refine workflows, and understand what audiences want from character-native microdramatic entertainment. Ultimately, the goal is to turn those learnings and workflows into creator tools, allowing users to create their own series from original characters and share them with audiences around the world,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.
This is the latest in a slew of recent features the startup has offered following its shift towards entertainment-focused features last year. In April, we rolled out a tool called Lorebook that users can use to create world-building information that characters can reference, and launched another feature called Books that allows users to insert themselves into a classic literary title of their choice, or roleplay as a character in that title.
The company announced Thursday that it is also testing a feature called “c.ai FM,” which allows users to put together audio series, and a feature called “c.ai Reads,” which allows users to create fiction. The Audio Series feature is currently available to some users in the experimental c.ai Labs program, which the company says is used by professional writers to create serialized audio dramas.
There is certainly an audience that prefers this form of entertainment. According to Sensor Tower, users spent more than 950 minutes each month on Character.AI in the first half of 2026.
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