Last reviewed
May 9, 2026
Sources
No citations yet
Review status
Needs citations
Revision
v2 · 2,491 words
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
See also: ChatGPT Plugins, ChatGPT Plugin Categories and Entertainment
Entertainment ChatGPT Plugins were a topical grouping of third-party plugins that connected ChatGPT to streaming catalogs, recommendation engines, trivia banks, and audio playback services during the plugin era operated by OpenAI between March 2023 and April 2024. The category covered tools that helped users find movies, television shows, music, podcasts, video games, and casual diversions such as chess and trivia. Plugins in this group typically used a manifest file and an OpenAPI specification to expose their service to the chatbot, letting GPT-4 call live APIs and surface real-time entertainment information inside a conversation. The entire plugin framework was deprecated on April 9, 2024 and was superseded by Custom GPTs and the GPT Store, so this article serves as a historical reference rather than a guide to active services.
At its peak in late 2023 the entertainment slice of the plugin store offered dozens of options ranging from cross-format recommenders such as Likewise to single-purpose toys such as the Chess plugin. Several of these tools were among the earliest external integrations approved for ChatGPT, and the category was frequently cited in launch coverage as a showcase for how a large language model could route natural language queries to specialized data sources. Many of the same vendors later rebuilt their plugins as actions inside Custom GPTs.
OpenAI announced ChatGPT Plugins on March 23, 2023, framing them as the company's first plugins for the chatbot and as a way for ChatGPT to access up-to-date information, run computations, and use third-party services. The initial alpha shipped with a small slate of partner integrations focused on travel, shopping, food, and developer tooling, plus two first-party plugins for code interpretation and web browsing. Entertainment was not represented in the launch list of partners, so the first wave of media and audio plugins arrived as part of the broader May 2023 rollout. On May 12, 2023 OpenAI announced that web browsing and plugins would become available to all ChatGPT Plus subscribers the following week, and on May 19, 2023 the plugin store opened more widely. The flood of new plugins approved across that month included most of the entertainment options that defined the category for the rest of its run.
Likewise, a Bellevue, Washington-based discovery platform backed by the private office of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, announced its plugin on May 16, 2023 and described it as the first ChatGPT plugin from the entertainment industry. MixerBox, a Taiwanese super-app developer, brought its OnePlayer plugin into the store in May 2023 and went on to become one of the largest single contributors to the plugin catalog, with thirteen approved plugins by July of that year. Open Trivia, a small developer plugin built on the Open Trivia Database, was approved on May 28, 2023. PlaylistAI, a mobile playlist generator that had launched as an app in August 2022 and added GPT-3 features in early 2023, released a ChatGPT plugin during the same May rollout window. Movie-focused plugins followed across the summer and early autumn, with Chat TMDB approved on July 7, 2023 and FilmFindr's Movie Night plugin first listed on September 1, 2023.
The category began to wind down in late 2023 once OpenAI announced Custom GPTs and the GPT Store at the company's first DevDay on November 6, 2023. The GPT Store opened to all ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Enterprise users on January 10, 2024. On March 19, 2024 OpenAI stopped allowing new conversations to be initiated with plugins, and on April 9, 2024 every existing plugin conversation was retired. Many of the entertainment plugins listed below resurfaced as Custom GPTs with similar names.
Entertainment was one of more than sixty topical groupings used to organize the plugin store. The category overlapped at the edges with several adjacent groupings, and a single plugin was often cross-listed in two or three categories during its time in the store. The most common overlaps were with the Gaming ChatGPT Plugins and Music ChatGPT Plugins categories, both of which contained items that some directories also surfaced under entertainment. Lifestyle, social, and shopping plugins occasionally appeared in entertainment listings as well when their primary use case was leisure rather than productivity.
| Adjacent category | Typical overlap with entertainment |
|---|---|
| Gaming | Trivia banks, chess, casual game discovery |
| Music | Playlist creation, streaming, mood-based audio |
| Lifestyle | Event finders, party planners, hobby tools |
| Travel | Local entertainment listings, ticket lookups |
| Shopping | Tickets, merchandise, themed gift discovery |
Directories such as plugin.surf, gptstore.ai, whatplugin.ai, and findplugin.ai each maintained their own taxonomy and did not always agree on how individual plugins were grouped. The entertainment label was therefore best understood as a loose user-facing description rather than a formal classification fixed by OpenAI.
The table below collects a representative sample of plugins that were classified as entertainment during the 2023 to 2024 plugin era. Each row includes the developer or platform, the primary function, and a verifiable date marker drawn from launch coverage or the public store listings preserved by archival directories. Many additional plugins existed in this space; only those with multiple independent sources are listed here.
| Plugin | Developer or platform | Primary function | Date marker |
|---|---|---|---|
| Likewise | Likewise (Bellevue, Washington) | Cross-format recommendations for TV, film, books, and podcasts | Announced May 16, 2023 |
| MixerBox OnePlayer | MixerBox (Taiwan) | Music, podcast, and video playback inside ChatGPT | Listed May 2023 |
| PlaylistAI | PlaylistAI | Generate Spotify playlists from natural language prompts | Plugin released during May 2023 rollout |
| Open Trivia | drengskapur (independent developer) | Trivia questions sourced from the Open Trivia Database | Approved May 28, 2023 |
| Chat TMDB | independent developer | Live data from The Movie Database for films, shows, and people | First listed July 7, 2023 |
| Movie Night (FilmFindr) | FilmFindr AI | Movie and television suggestions tied to AmazonVideo lookups | First listed September 1, 2023 |
| Speechki | Speechki | Convert ChatGPT output into spoken audio for podcasts and audiobooks | Approved May 2023 |
| Show Me | bra1nDump | Generate diagrams, mind maps, and storyboards inside chats | First listed June 20, 2023 |
The Chess plugin, often listed under both gaming and entertainment, allowed users to play full games against ChatGPT with selectable difficulty levels, with the chatbot tracking the board state and rendering moves in algebraic notation. The Wolfram plugin, while primarily a computation and knowledge tool, was sometimes filed under entertainment in directory taxonomies because of its sports statistics, music theory, and trivia-style outputs. Show Me appears in entertainment lists in some directories thanks to its support for storyboards and visual story planning, although its core use was technical diagramming.
During its active period the entertainment category was used in three broad ways. The first was as a personal recommender that turned a free-form description of a mood, evening plan, or social context into a shortlist of titles. Likewise was the standout example, designed to answer prompts of the form "my husband and I are looking for a thriller with a strong female lead on either Netflix or Hulu" by combining ChatGPT's natural language handling with Likewise's catalog of user-generated datapoints. FilmFindr's Movie Night plugin took a similar approach but narrowed the search to titles available on Amazon's video service.
The second use case was structured catalog lookup. Chat TMDB exposed the public application programming interface of The Movie Database, letting users ask for cast lists, release dates, alternative titles, images, videos, popularity rankings, and credits. Because the underlying TMDB data was already widely used in third-party movie tools, the plugin acted as a polite wrapper over an existing endpoint, with prompt engineering limited to translating English questions into TMDB query parameters. Likewise also leaned on structured data, although its catalog mixed films with books, podcasts, and television.
The third use case was direct media playback or generation. MixerBox OnePlayer let users request a playlist by genre or mood (including pop, electronic dance, hip hop, K-pop, and jazz, with mood tags such as workout, chill, romance, focus, and party) and then opened a streaming session inside the MixerBox web player. PlaylistAI built playlists on Spotify accounts that the user had connected, returning a hyperlink so the suggested tracks could be saved with a single click. Speechki targeted the audio side of the same problem by turning generated text into ready-to-use podcast or audiobook clips with multilingual lifelike voices.
A fourth, smaller pattern involved games and toys. The Chess plugin gave ChatGPT a structured way to play out a board game move by move, while Open Trivia turned the chatbot into a host for ad hoc quizzes by category and difficulty.
Like all ChatGPT Plugins, entertainment plugins were defined by a small JSON manifest known as ai-plugin.json that lived at a well-known URL on the developer's domain, paired with an OpenAPI document that described the available endpoints. The chatbot read the manifest to learn the plugin's display name, description, authentication method, and contact information, then consulted the OpenAPI document to decide which routes to call. Authentication was usually unauthenticated for media catalogs (Chat TMDB, Open Trivia) and OAuth-based for plugins that touched a user account (PlaylistAI for Spotify, MixerBox for personal playback, Likewise for saved lists). Output was returned as JSON, which ChatGPT then summarized in natural language for the user.
Because the plugin sandbox could only see the response payload of an API call, latency-sensitive features such as live streaming were handled by passing back a hyperlink that the user opened in a browser. This explains why most music plugins ended their interaction with a clickable Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube URL rather than playing audio inside ChatGPT itself. Diagrams and storyboards from Show Me followed a similar model, with the plugin returning a link to a hosted image rendered from a Mermaid or PlantUML source.
Developers had to keep their plugin specifications under a fixed token budget so the manifest and the OpenAPI summary fit inside the context window allotted to plugin descriptions. This constraint encouraged tight, single-purpose plugins, and it is part of the reason the entertainment category fragmented into many small offerings rather than consolidating around a few cross-domain super-apps. MixerBox was a partial exception because it shipped a family of related plugins (OnePlayer for media, plus separate plugins for podcasts, news, and other utilities) rather than a single combined manifest.
Launch coverage of the plugin store frequently highlighted entertainment plugins as approachable demonstrations of how ChatGPT could move beyond text completion. The Likewise launch, in particular, drew attention because of the company's connection to Bill Gates's office and because entertainment recommendation was widely seen as a natural fit for natural language. Coverage by trade outlets including GeekWire, Business Wire, and Yahoo Finance described the plugin as the first ChatGPT plugin from the entertainment industry, a framing that the company itself used in its press materials.
MixerBox was repeatedly singled out as the largest single plugin developer during the May 2023 rollout. Trade press in Taiwan reported in July 2023 that the company had become the most prolific external contributor to the catalog, with thirteen approved plugins covering music, podcasts, news, photo enhancement, and other utilities. The company's willingness to ship a family of related entertainment plugins gave it a presence in several adjacent categories at once and made it a recurring example in OpenAI ecosystem coverage.
The category also surfaced criticisms that applied to the wider plugin store. Average ChatGPT Plus subscribers often found it difficult to discover the right entertainment plugin, since each plugin had to be manually selected before a session and the recommender plugins did not federate across one another. Coverage of the April 2024 deprecation cited fragmented usage and discovery friction as a major reason OpenAI moved to Custom GPTs, where a single GPT could blend several actions and a custom prompt without forcing the user to juggle plugin toggles.
When OpenAI announced Custom GPTs at DevDay on November 6, 2023, the company described the feature as a way to package instructions, knowledge, and external API actions into a single shareable assistant. The GPT Store launched two months later on January 10, 2024 with category browsing that loosely mirrored the plugin store. Several of the most visible entertainment plugins reappeared as GPTs in the new store, often with the same brand and similar API endpoints exposed through the actions feature. PlaylistAI, FilmFindr, and several MixerBox tools each published successor GPTs during the first quarter of 2024.
The migration was not lossless. Plugin manifests had supported patterns that did not map cleanly onto actions, including chained tool calls that depended on session-level identifiers. Some entertainment plugins simplified their behavior in the move, while others (notably plugins built on free trivia or movie databases) were not rebuilt and have left only archived store pages as evidence of their existence. The plugin store itself was taken offline alongside the broader deprecation, so the original ai-plugin.json files and OpenAPI documents are now available only through community archives and snapshots taken in 2023.