Digital Media ChatGPT Plugins

See also: ChatGPT Plugins, ChatGPT Plugin Categories and Digital Media

Digital Media ChatGPT Plugins were a topical grouping inside the ChatGPT plugin store that gathered third-party extensions for working with video, music, podcasts, audio, image filters, and streaming media catalogues. Notable entries included Likewise (entertainment recommendations), MixerBox OnePlayer (music and podcast streaming), Video Insights and ChatWithVideo (YouTube transcription and analysis), Speechki (text-to-speech), Visla and Lucas (short video creation), Polarr (photo and video filters), PlaylistAI (Spotify and Apple Music playlists), and Canva (social graphics). They ran inside the plugins beta that OpenAI operated from March 23, 2023 until April 9, 2024, when the framework was sunset in favour of Custom GPTs and the GPT Store.^[1][2][3] No digital media plugin remains installable through ChatGPT today; their use cases now live in custom GPTs, ChatGPT's built-in image generation, and standalone media tools.

The category sat alongside Entertainment, Photography, and Design, and absorbed plugins that did not fit neatly into any single sibling tab. Digital media plugins covered three main use cases: content discovery (finding a TV show, song, or podcast matching a description), content transformation (turning text into spoken audio or pulling a transcript from a video), and content creation (drafting a short stock-footage video or finding a filter for a photo). Most were free for ChatGPT Plus subscribers, although several required a paid account on the developer's service for actual playback or output.

ELI5: what were they?

Imagine ChatGPT as a smart assistant that could only talk. Plugins were like apps you could plug into it so it could do more, the way adding apps to a phone gives the phone new powers. Digital media plugins were the apps about pictures, video, music, and sound. One could turn a story ChatGPT wrote into a spoken audio file. Another could read a YouTube video and tell you what it said. Another could build a short video out of stock clips, or make a music playlist for you. OpenAI later replaced this whole app system with a newer one called custom GPTs, so these particular apps no longer work inside ChatGPT.

When were ChatGPT plugins launched and retired?

OpenAI announced ChatGPT Plugins on March 23, 2023, describing them in its launch post as "tools designed specifically for language models with safety as a core principle" that "help ChatGPT access up-to-date information, run computations, or use third-party services."^[1] The launch wave shipped with twelve partner integrations, none focused on digital media: Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, and Zapier, plus first-party plugins for browsing and a code interpreter.^[1]

Access opened in alpha to ChatGPT Plus subscribers. On May 12, 2023, OpenAI announced plugins would become available to all Plus subscribers the following week, and on May 19, 2023, the plugin store opened to all Plus customers. Independent roundups in mid-May 2023 listed roughly 69 approved plugins.^[4] By August 2023 public roundups counted around 800 entries, and by December 26, 2023 the catalogue passed roughly 1,000 plugins (about 1,033 by one tracker) across more than sixty categories.^[21]

The digital media tab filled out gradually. Polarr appeared in May 2023. Likewise was announced on May 16, 2023.^[6][7] Speechki was approved on or around May 20, 2023.^[14] By summer, Video Insights, ChatWithVideo, VoxScript, MixerBox OnePlayer, MixerBox News, and Visla had joined. Idomoo's Lucas plugin, soft launched in March 2023, received a commercial announcement on August 23, 2023.^[16] On September 5, 2023, OpenAI added a Canva plugin.^[20]

On November 6, 2023, at the first OpenAI DevDay, Sam Altman introduced GPTs, user-built versions of ChatGPT bundling custom instructions, knowledge files, and Actions.^[2] The plugin store stopped accepting new submissions shortly afterward. The GPT Store opened on January 10, 2024.^[22] New plugin installs and conversations were disabled on March 19, 2024, and existing plugin conversations stopped working on April 9, 2024.^[3]

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How did digital media plugins work?

Digital media plugins used the standard plugin architecture: a manifest file (ai-plugin.json) at /.well-known/ai-plugin.json, plus an OpenAPI specification documenting the endpoints. ChatGPT consumed both at install time and used the description to decide when to call the plugin. During a conversation, ChatGPT routed a request to the endpoint over HTTPS, parsed the JSON response, and summarised it back. Authentication options included no auth, service-level keys, user-level keys, and OAuth.

Typical digital media patterns:

• querying a streaming or recommendation index for titles matching a description
• fetching transcripts and metadata from YouTube and Daily Motion
• converting text into spoken audio via a text-to-speech engine
• building short stock-footage videos from a topic or script
• surfacing photo and video filter presets on the developer's website
• assembling music playlists on Spotify or Apple Music from a generated track list

Users could install up to three plugins simultaneously, encouraging combinations such as a transcript fetcher paired with a text-to-speech plugin.

Which plugins helped with media creation and discovery?

The plugins below were widely cited as digital media or media-adjacent entries during the plugins beta. All claims describe behaviour during that beta period; none of these plugins remain installable through ChatGPT today. This wiki only lists plugins that can be cross-referenced to multiple credible sources.

Likewise

Likewise was an entertainment recommendation plugin built by the Bellevue, Washington startup of the same name, backed by Bill Gates's private office. The company announced it on May 16, 2023 as the entertainment industry's first ChatGPT integration.^[6][7] "The Likewise ChatGPT plugin is an entertainment industry first that uses state of the art AI to make it easier than ever to find your next favorite TV show, movie, book, or podcast in a way never before possible," said Ian Morris, CEO of Likewise.^[7] The plugin returned personalised TV shows, movies, books, and podcasts along with streaming availability, drawing on hundreds of millions of data points from about six million registered users.^[6]

MixerBox OnePlayer

MixerBox OnePlayer was a media-streaming plugin built by Taiwan-based developer MixerBox. OnePlayer let users search and play music, podcasts, and videos inside ChatGPT, with genre-based requests across pop, electronic dance, hip hop, K-pop, rock, country, J-pop, and jazz, plus mood-based playlists for workouts, focus, sleep, and travel.^[8] By July 2023, MixerBox was the largest single developer in the ChatGPT Plugin Store, with more than ten plugins published.^[10]

MixerBox News

MixerBox News was a companion plugin that aggregated breaking news across business, finance, politics, society, entertainment, sports, lifestyle, and technology, delivering category-filtered briefings inside the chat.^[9]

Video Insights

Video Insights was a YouTube and Daily Motion analysis plugin that let ChatGPT summarise, transcribe, and pull metadata from a public video URL.^[11] It used speech recognition to produce a transcript when one was not already published, retrieved title, description, duration, and view counts, and could compare two videos side by side.

ChatWithVideo

ChatWithVideo was a YouTube question-and-answer plugin.^[12] The user pasted a URL, the plugin loaded the video into a session, and ChatGPT answered questions, summarised key points, or jumped to a timestamp. Video Insights leaned toward batch metadata extraction; ChatWithVideo positioned itself as a single-video conversational interface.

VoxScript

VoxScript was a multi-source data plugin that combined YouTube transcript search, Google search results, and financial-data lookups in one extension.^[13] For digital media users, the YouTube features were the draw: endpoints to fetch a video's title and description, retrieve transcripts in chunked segments, and search YouTube by keyword. It could not generate transcripts for videos that did not already publish them.

Speechki

Speechki was a text-to-speech plugin that converted generated text into a downloadable audio file. It reported support for more than 300 voices across 78 languages and dialects, and returned an MP3 link, an audio player page, or an embed snippet.^[14] Speechki was approved on or around May 20, 2023, and was used to turn ChatGPT scripts into voiceovers, audiobooks, or podcast pilots.

Visla

Visla was a short-form video creation plugin that built a stock-footage video around a user-supplied topic. It accepted parameters for aspect ratio, content theme, and branding, and stitched together licensed clips with generated narration. Visla was commonly paired with Speechki and promoted as a way to assemble draft social videos for TikTok or Instagram Reels.

Lucas (Idomoo)

Lucas was an AI video creator built by Israeli company Idomoo. The plugin was announced on August 23, 2023, after a soft launch beginning in March 2023, during which more than 500,000 videos were generated.^[15][16] Lucas turned a chat response into a video combining script, voiceover, stock footage, and an interactive call-to-action button, returning several variants. Idomoo announced a commercial launch on September 21, 2023.^[17]

Polarr

Polarr was a filter discovery plugin attached to Polarr's photo and video editing platform.^[18] Users described an aesthetic in plain language (a vintage look, a cinematic colour grade, an enhanced sunset), and the plugin returned a description of a matching filter with a preview link to apply it inside Polarr's web tool.

PlaylistAI

PlaylistAI was a Spotify (and later Apple Music) playlist creation plugin.^[19] After ChatGPT generated a track list from a description such as a workout mood or a decade range, PlaylistAI created a real Spotify playlist on the user's account and returned a shareable URL. The standalone PlaylistAI app launched in August 2022 and reported around 50,000 playlists created by April 2023.

Canva

Canva's plugin was added on September 5, 2023.^[20] It produced social posts, short Instagram Reels, TikTok video templates, banners, and presentations from a chat prompt, generating layout options the user could refine inside Canva. It was available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers, who paid $20 per month for GPT-4 and the plugin catalogue.

Plugins commonly listed but not separately documented

Third-party roundups during 2023 occasionally cited additional media-adjacent plugins such as Podcast Search (which queried PodcastIndex.org) and ABC Music Notation (which converted ABC notation into WAV, MIDI, and PostScript files). These names appear in master directories at List of ChatGPT Plugins but primary-source coverage is thin.

What did a typical media workflow look like?

Digital media plugins tended to be combined rather than used alone. Three combinations recur in tutorials from 2023. The first was the script-to-audio chain: a user asked ChatGPT to draft a podcast intro, then asked Speechki to convert it into an MP3. The second was the transcript-and-summarise chain: a user pasted a YouTube URL, ChatWithVideo or Video Insights pulled the transcript, and ChatGPT summarised the points. The third was the short-video assembly chain: a user described a topic, Visla or Lucas assembled a stock-footage video, Speechki added a voiceover, and PlaylistAI or MixerBox OnePlayer suggested music.

These chains illustrated the appeal of plugins as an early form of tool use for a large language model. Prompt engineering inside the chat replaced the menu-driven workflow of a traditional media application, although most users still finished their work in dedicated editing tools.

Why were ChatGPT plugins deprecated?

OpenAI gave several reasons for sunsetting plugins in favour of GPTs and Actions. Discovery was the central problem: the plugin store presented a flat catalogue with light category labels, making it hard for casual users to find a specific media plugin. A user looking for video transcription could end up choosing among Video Insights, ChatWithVideo, and VoxScript without much guidance.

Plugins were also single-purpose. A plugin could only expose API endpoints, while a GPT bundled custom instructions, knowledge files, and Actions in one package.^[2] Conversation friction further hurt adoption: activating plugins required choosing the GPT-4 model, opening a plugin picker, and toggling individual plugins, with only three active plugins per conversation. Finally, OpenAI announced at DevDay that GPT creators would be eligible for revenue sharing through the GPT Store; the plugin program offered no such incentive.^[22]

What replaced digital media ChatGPT plugins?

Several product categories absorbed the use cases digital media plugins had served. Custom GPTs are user-created versions of ChatGPT that combine instructions, knowledge files, and Actions, the direct successor to plugins.^[2] Many digital media developers ported backends to GPTs with limited code changes because Actions still uses an OpenAPI specification. The GPT Store opened on January 10, 2024 and surfaced media-oriented GPTs in its featured tiles from day one.^[22]

For still images, OpenAI integrated DALL-E 3 into ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise on October 19, 2023. After that release, anyone wanting a cover image, banner, or thumbnail used the built-in image feature rather than a plugin. Users wanting deeper control returned to standalone services. Spotify and Apple Music kept native playlist tooling. Descript, CapCut, and Adobe Premiere absorbed the transcription and trim use cases pioneered by Video Insights and ChatWithVideo. Idomoo continued to develop Lucas commercially. In 2024 and 2025, the industry shifted toward the Model Context Protocol and general-purpose agents, with many plugin patterns reappearing as MCP servers.

How did digital media plugins relate to other categories?

The digital media tab overlapped with sibling categories. Several plugins also appeared, depending on the directory, under Entertainment, Photography, Design, or Data Visualization.

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Few plugins fit a single tab cleanly, and OpenAI never published an authoritative taxonomy. Third-party catalogues such as Plugin Surf, Plugin Directory, and the round-ups by Orren Prunckun on Medium each used their own labels.^[4][5] Digital media plugins were among the first widely available demonstrations that a large language model could orchestrate calls to streaming, transcript, and rendering APIs from inside a chat. Workflows now ordinary inside Custom GPTs and MCP servers, such as fetching a YouTube transcript, generating a voiceover, or assembling a Spotify playlist, were prototyped during the plugin era between March 2023 and April 2024.

See also

• ChatGPT Plugins
• ChatGPT Plugin Categories
• Digital Media
• List of ChatGPT Plugins
• Custom GPTs
• GPT Store
• Generative AI
• Entertainment ChatGPT Plugins
• Photography ChatGPT Plugins
• Design ChatGPT Plugins
• ChatGPT
• OpenAI
• GPT-4
• Large Language Model
• Prompt Engineering

References

1. OpenAI. *ChatGPT plugins*. March 23, 2023. https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-plugins/ ↩
2. OpenAI. *Introducing GPTs*. November 6, 2023. https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpts/ ↩
3. OpenAI Developer Community. *Plugin Store Closed March 19 2024*. https://community.openai.com/t/plugin-store-and-new-chats-with-plugins-closed-march-19-2024/689877 ↩
4. Orren Prunckun. *A List Of All Approved ChatGPT Plugins As Of 14 May 2023*. Medium. https://orren.medium.com/a-list-of-all-approved-chatgpt-plugins-as-of-14-may-2023-4c60afbfdcfc ↩
5. Orren Prunckun. *A List Of All Approved ChatGPT Plugins As Of 28 May 2023*. Medium. https://orren.medium.com/a-list-of-all-approved-chatgpt-plugins-as-of-28-may-2023-f991f3d2016e ↩
6. GeekWire. *Likewise launches ChatGPT plugin*. May 16, 2023. https://www.geekwire.com/2023/likewise-launches-chatgpt-plugin-to-use-ai-to-recommend-tv-shows-movies-books-and-more/ ↩
7. Business Wire. *Likewise Launches ChatGPT Plugin: A Revolutionary Tool for Personalized Entertainment Recommendations*. May 16, 2023. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230516005868/en/ ↩
8. MixerBox. *OnePlayer*. https://www.mixerbox.com/chatgpt-plugins/oneplayer ↩
9. MixerBox. *MixerBox News Plugin for ChatGPT*. https://www.mixerbox.com/blog/news ↩
10. PR Newswire. *Largest ChatGPT Plugin Store Developer, MixerBox*. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/largest-chatgpt-plugin-store-developer-mixerbox-transforms-the-future-of-navigation-with-worlds-first-ai-chatbot-for-maps-301869917.html ↩
11. ChatGPT Plugin Directory. *Video Insights*. https://chatgpt-plugin.org/plugins/video-insights/ ↩
12. ChatGPT Plugin Directory. *ChatWithVideo*. https://chatgpt-plugin.org/plugins/chatwithvideo/ ↩
13. Plugin Surf. *VoxScript*. https://plugin.surf/plugin/voxscript ↩
14. OpenAI Developer Community. *Speechki ChatGPT Plugin approved*. https://community.openai.com/t/speechki-chatgpt-plugin-has-been-approved-and-is-now-available-in-the-store/190024 ↩
15. Idomoo. *Idomoo Launches ChatGPT Plugin*. https://www.idomoo.com/blog/idomoo-launches-chatgpt-plugin-for-real-time-ai-video-generation/ ↩
16. Business Wire. *Lucas ChatGPT Plugin Delivers Text to Video*. August 21, 2023. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230821296941/en/Lucas-ChatGPT-Plugin-Delivers-Simple-and-Seamless-Text-to-Video ↩
17. Business Wire. *Idomoo Announces Commercial Launch of Lucas*. September 21, 2023. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230921404948/en/Idomoo-Announces-Commercial-Launch-of-Lucas-AI-Video-Creator ↩
18. Plugin Surf. *Polarr*. https://plugin.surf/plugin/polarr ↩
19. Plugin Surf. *PlaylistAI: Spotify*. https://plugin.surf/plugin/playlistai ↩
20. Dataconomy. *Canva Plugin has just arrived at ChatGPT*. September 5, 2023. https://dataconomy.com/2023/09/05/how-to-use-canva-chatgpt-plugin/ ↩
21. KDnuggets. *ChatGPT Plugins: Everything You Need To Know*. https://www.kdnuggets.com/2023/06/chatgpt-plugins-everything-need-know.html ↩
22. VentureBeat. *OpenAI launches GPT Store*. January 10, 2024. https://venturebeat.com/ai/openai-launches-gpt-store-but-revenue-sharing-is-still-to-come ↩