Microdramas are so trendy today that almost every type of company in the attention economy space – whether dedicated microdrama apps, social media giants (TikTok and Instagram), or streaming services (Peacock, Amazon Prime and India’s JioHotstar) – is creating a product to take advantage of the opportunity.

Character.AI, which allows people to chat with personalized AI avatars, is also tapping into this nascent market by producing its own microdramas using AI characters. But there’s an interesting twist that takes advantage of the company’s core product: Users 18 and older can chat with the characters from these shows, ask them questions, and even role-play different stories.

For starters, the startup is launching three microdramas: a romance series called “Last Summer,” a horror show titled “The Nighttime Game,” and a Hunger Games-like survival microdrama called “Eden Fall.”

Character.AI says these dramas were created using AI production tools, and in the long term, they aim to help users create their own characters and series.

“Starting from a studio-led model, c.ai Series allows our production team to 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 creation tools, allowing users to create their own series based on original characters and share them with a global audience,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.

This is the latest in a series of recent features from the startup following its shift toward entertainment-focused features last year. In April, it introduced 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 select titles of classic literature or play characters from them.

The company said Thursday that it is also testing a feature, called c.ai FM, that will allow users to create audio series, and another that will allow them to create fiction, called c.ai Reads. The audio series feature is currently available to select users under its experimental c.ai Labs program, which the company says professional writers are using to create serialized audio dramas.

There is certainly an audience for this form of entertainment. Users spent more than 950 minutes on Character.AI each month in the first half of 2026, according to Sensor Tower.