Panjaya.ai has announced a strategic partnership with Shortical, enabling multilingual, emotionally authentic AI localisation for mobile-first microdramas.
The collaboration follows a period of rapid audience growth for Shortical, with more than 20 million episodes of its mobile-first content watched every month. While demand continues to grow, traditional dubbing workflows have struggled to keep pace with productions that release new content daily or weekly, limiting global audience expansion.
Panjaya’s expressive adaptation technology automates translation, voice performance adaptation, timing, and advanced lip-sync, aiming to enable multilingual storytelling at scale. Shortical’s content is currently being localised into Spanish, Portuguese, French and German, with Japanese and Russian expected to be available soon. These markets represent more than a billion potential viewers, said the companies, with the partnership aiming to enable distribution at a fraction of the production cost.
Guy Piekarz, CEO of Panjaya, said, “Great dramas resonate with people when the performance feels raw and authentic, and they can resonate with billions of people when they feel that same way in the viewer’s own language. We’re witnessing the emergence of truly global storytelling formats. For the first time, creators in the rapidly growing micro-drama industry can bring emotionally authentic stories to more than a billion additional viewers across languages and cultures at a fraction of the production cost. This is a major milestone for the category and one that will delight audiences around the world.”
CEO of Shortical, Guy Shimoni, added, “Serialised, creative storytelling lives or dies on emotional authenticity. Our data shows how audiences immediately notice when localisation breaks immersion. Panjaya was the first platform that allowed us to scale internationally without losing the emotional intensity and cinematic quality that define our shows.”
