These days, microdramas are so popular that just about every kind of company in the attention economy is building products to capitalize on the opportunity, including dedicated apps for microdramas, social media giants (TikTok and Instagram), and streaming services (Peacock, Amazon Prime, India’s JioHotstar).
Character.AI, which allows people to chat with customized AI avatars, is also targeting this emerging market by creating its own microdramas using AI characters. But there’s an interesting twist that leverages the company’s core products. Users 18 and older can chat with the show’s characters, ask questions, and even role-play various storylines.
The startup plans to release three microdramas: the romance series ‘Last Summer’, the horror show ‘The Nighttime Game’, and the Hunger Games-like survival microdrama ‘Eden Fall’.
Character.AI said that these dramas were created using AI creation tools, and that in the long term, it aims to help users create their own characters and series.
“Starting with a studio-led model, c.ai Series allows our production team to develop the format, refine workflows, and understand what audiences want from character-based microdramatic entertainment. Over time, the goal is to translate these learnings and workflows into creator tools so users can create their own series with original characters and share them with audiences around the world,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.
This is the latest of a slew of new features the startup has rolled out since shifting to entertainment-focused features last year. Last April, it introduced a tool called Lorebook, which users can use to generate world-building information that characters can reference, and launched another feature called Books, which allows users to insert themselves into a classic literary title of their choice or role-play as a character from that item.
The company said Thursday that it is also testing a feature called c.ai FM that will allow users to curate audio series, and a feature that will allow users to create novels called c.ai Reads. The audio series feature is available to selected users in the experimental c.ai Labs program, which is currently being used by professional writers to create serialized audio dramas.
There is definitely an audience that loves this form of entertainment. According to Sensor Tower, users spent more than 950 minutes on Character.AI each month in the first half of 2026.
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