Microdramas have become incredibly popular, prompting nearly every player in the attention economy—from dedicated microdrama apps and social media giants like TikTok and Instagram to streaming services such as Peacock, Amazon Prime, and India’s JioHotstar—to develop their own products for this growing market. Character.AI, a platform that enables users to chat with customized AI avatars, is also entering this space by producing its own microdramas featuring AI characters. However, there's an intriguing twist that leverages the company's core offering: users aged 18 and older can interact with the characters in these shows, ask them questions, and even role-play different storylines. The startup is launching three microdramas initially: a romance series called "Last Summer," a horror show titled "The Nighttime Game," and a Hunger Games-style survival microdrama named "Eden Fall."

Character.AI explains that these dramas were created using AI production tools, and in the long term, it aims to enable users to 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." This initiative is part of a broader shift toward entertainment-focused features that began last year. In April, the company teased a tool called Lorebook, which allows users to create world-building information that characters can reference, and launched a feature called Books, enabling users to insert themselves into classic literature titles or role-play as characters from them.

On Thursday, the company announced it is also testing a feature called c.ai FM, which will let users assemble audio series, and another feature called c.ai Reads for creating fiction. The audio series feature is currently available to select users through its experimental c.ai Labs program, which the company says professional writers are using to produce serialized audio dramas. There is clearly an audience for this type of entertainment: according to Sensor Tower, users spent more than 950 minutes on Character.AI each month in the first half of 2026.