Character.AI launches its own microdramas, with a chat twist

Microdramas are such a draw right now that nearly every kind of company in the attention-economy space — dedicated microdrama apps, social media giants like TikTok and Instagram, and streaming services such as Peacock, Amazon Prime, and India’s JioHotstar — is building a product to tap the opportunity. Character.AI, the startup that lets people chat with customized AI avatars, is tapping this budding market too, producing its own microdramas using AI characters — but with an interesting twist that leans directly on its core product: users older than 18 can chat with the shows’ characters, ask them questions, and even roleplay different storylines.

The company is starting with three shows: a romance titled “Last Summer,” a horror series called “The Nighttime Game,” and a Hunger Games-style survival microdrama named “Eden Fall.” Character.AI says the dramas were created using AI production 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 lets our production team develop the format, refine the workflow, and understand what audiences want from Character-native Microdrama entertainment. Over time, the goal is to turn those learnings and workflows into creator tools, enabling users to make their own series from original Characters and share them with a global audience,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.

The launch extends a run of entertainment-focused features Character.AI has shipped since shifting toward that category last year. In April, it teased Lorebook, a tool for building world-building information that characters can reference, and launched Books, which lets users insert themselves into select classic-literature titles or roleplay as characters from them. On Thursday, the company said it is also testing c.ai FM, for assembling audio series, and c.ai Reads, for creating fiction; the audio-series tool is currently limited to select users in its experimental c.ai Labs program, where the company says professional writers are producing serialized audio dramas.

The bet is on an audience that’s already spending significant time on the app: users spent more than 950 minutes on Character.AI each month in the first half of 2026, according to Sensor Tower.

Why it matters

Character.AI is betting that chat-native, roleplayable characters — not just passive video — are what set it apart in an already-crowded microdrama field, using its own engagement numbers as the pitch. If the studio-led format works, the creator tools it’s building toward could turn viewers of these shows into producers of their own.