Last reviewed
May 9, 2026
Sources
No citations yet
Review status
Needs citations
Revision
v2 ยท 3,003 words
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
Podcasts ChatGPT plugins were a category of third-party extensions for ChatGPT that connected the chatbot to podcast search engines, episode transcripts, audio narration tools, and listening recommendation services. The plugins ran inside the ChatGPT Plugins framework that OpenAI opened on March 23, 2023, broadly rolled out to ChatGPT Plus subscribers around May 12, 2023, and retired on April 9, 2024 after being superseded by Custom GPTs and the GPT Store.
Podcasts plugins occupied a small but visible slice of the directory. Aggregator sites that mirrored OpenAI's plugin store, such as plugin.surf, findplugin.ai, and gptstore.ai, listed them under "audio and music," "entertainment," or a dedicated "podcasts" filter. The category overlapped with music ChatGPT plugins and broader digital media ChatGPT plugins listings, since several developers shipped multi-purpose audio tools that touched both.
See also: ChatGPT Plugins, ChatGPT Plugin Categories and Podcasts
The broader plugin program began on March 23, 2023, when OpenAI announced an initial set of partners that included Expedia, Instacart, KAYAK, Klarna, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Wolfram, and Zapier, alongside a first-party web browsing plugin and the Code Interpreter [1][2]. None of the launch partners worked on podcasts, and the audio side of the store filled in over the following weeks as outside developers gained access.
By the time plugins reached general beta availability for ChatGPT Plus subscribers around May 12, 2023, the directory contained roughly 70 third-party plugins, growing to several hundred over the summer [3][4]. Podcast-related plugins arrived in waves. Speechki, a text-to-speech tool used for podcast and audiobook production, was approved on the OpenAI Developer Community forum on May 3, 2023 [5]. The Bill Gates-backed entertainment recommender Likewise, which surfaced podcasts alongside television, film, and books, announced its plugin on May 16, 2023 [6][7]. The dedicated podcast discovery and transcript tools followed in June: Listen Notes published its plugin on June 20, 2023, and the shownotes plugin was added the same day [8][9][10]. MixerBox Podcasts followed on July 24, 2023 [11].
The plugin program ended in early 2024. OpenAI announced that on March 19, 2024 users would no longer install new plugins or start new conversations with existing ones, and that all remaining plugin conversations would shut down on April 9, 2024 [12]. By that point Custom GPTs, unveiled at DevDay on November 6, 2023, and the GPT Store, launched on January 10, 2024, had absorbed most of the active developer base.
The official plugin store grouped third-party tools into browsable categories. Podcasts plugins sat across several headings. Mirrors typically split them between "audio and music" (where Listen Notes, shownotes, and MixerBox Podcasts were filed) and broader "entertainment" headings (where Likewise tended to land because it covered film, television, and books alongside podcasts) [13][14]. Speechki was usually listed under "writing" or "productivity" because its core function was text to audio, but it was widely used by hobbyist podcasters to draft narrated segments.
The podcast vertical broke down into a few distinct sub-types:
| Sub-type | Purpose | Representative plugins |
|---|---|---|
| Podcast search and discovery | Find shows and episodes by topic, host, or keyword | Listen Notes, MixerBox Podcasts, Podcast search (esne.ai) |
| Transcripts and summaries | Pull episode transcripts and condense them into notes | shownotes |
| Cross-media recommendations | Surface podcasts alongside other entertainment | Likewise |
| Audio production from text | Turn ChatGPT output into spoken audio | Speechki |
The split mirrored the broader plugin ecosystem: a small set of integrations with established services plus a long tail of niche developer tools.
The paragraphs below describe plugins cross-referenced in two or more independent secondary sources from 2023 or early 2024. Plugins listed only in single uncorroborated mirrors are omitted to keep the entry factual.
Listen Notes was the most prominent dedicated podcast plugin. It was developed by Listen Notes, Inc., a San Francisco company incorporated in October 2017 by Wenbin Fang, a former Nextdoor engineer whose side project had become one of the largest independent podcast search databases on the web [15][16]. The plugin shipped on June 20, 2023, the date recorded by plugin.surf and confirmed by the company's changelog post for June 21, 2023 [8][10][17].
The plugin gave ChatGPT a natural language interface to PodcastAPI.com, the commercial API behind the Listen Notes search engine. Users could ask the chatbot to find shows by keyword, topic, host, brand, language, or region, request specific episodes, or pull a random episode through a feature called justListen. It returned structured metadata such as podcast titles, episode descriptions, publisher names, episode lengths, and direct links back to the Listen Notes site [10][18].
The technical implementation was unusually transparent because Listen Notes published the source code on GitHub. The plugin was written in JavaScript and deployed on Cloudflare Pages with serverless Pages Functions handling the proxy calls to PodcastAPI.com [18][19]. Wenbin Fang published a developer case study on the Listen Notes blog that walked through the architecture, which became one of the more cited reference implementations for ChatGPT plugin authors at the time [19]. The plugin remained active until OpenAI's April 9, 2024 shutdown, after which the GitHub repository was archived [18]. The PodcastAPI service itself continued to operate independently.
The shownotes plugin, hosted at plugins.shownotes.io and run by an operator who used the contact email cooper@shownotes.io, was the leading transcript and summarization tool in the podcast category [20][21]. Aggregator records list June 20, 2023 as its first added date, the same day as the Listen Notes launch [9]. The parent service shownotes.io predated the plugin and had built a library of podcast transcripts powered by the OpenAI Whisper speech-to-text model.
The plugin exposed three endpoints that ChatGPT could call:
| Endpoint | Function | Output |
|---|---|---|
| Show transcript | Return the transcript for a podcast episode by show name | Plain text transcript |
| YouTube search | Find related YouTube videos for a topic | List of video titles and IDs |
| YouTube transcript | Return the transcript for a YouTube video by video ID | Plain text transcript |
Users prompted the plugin to fetch a transcript by show name, then asked ChatGPT to summarize the episode, locate quotes, or answer questions about the content [9][20][22]. Because the plugin also returned YouTube transcripts by video ID, it doubled as a tool for video interviews. Reviewers highlighted three core use cases: condensing long interviews into summaries, locating specific segments, and generating recommended episode lists [22][23].
Speechki was a text-to-speech plugin that turned ChatGPT output into ready-to-use audio. The Speechki team announced approval on the OpenAI Developer Community forum on May 3, 2023, making it one of the earliest audio plugins in the directory [5]. The plugin was published by Speechki, a San Francisco company with founders originally from Omsk, Russia, including co-founder Kirill Parinov [24][25]. The company's main business outside ChatGPT was synthetic narration for audiobooks and podcasts.
The plugin offered two main commands. The first, get-speakers-samples, returned a list of available voices with metadata such as voice ID, speaker name, language, gender, and narration style. The second, tts, accepted a text input and a voice selection and returned an audio file [26]. Users could request the output as a downloadable link, an audio player page, or an embed.
Speechki's draw for podcasters and amateur narrators was scale. According to contemporary reviews, the plugin supported more than 300 voices spanning 78 languages and dialects at launch [27][28]. Later marketing pages on the Speechki site listed expanded counts approaching 1,100 voices and 80 languages, but those figures reflect post-plugin development [25]. In practice the plugin was used to draft sample voiceovers, generate narration in languages the user could not read aloud, and prototype short podcast intros and outros.
MixerBox is a Taiwan-based developer that became one of the most prolific contributors to the plugin store, sometimes described as the largest single plugin publisher [29][30]. The MixerBox Podcasts plugin was announced on July 24, 2023, several weeks after MixerBox's broader entry into the directory with plugins for navigation, search, weather, and media [31][32].
The plugin acted as a podcast directory inside the chat. Users could ask ChatGPT to find shows in a category such as comedy, news, true crime, education, history, religion, government, society, music, or television, request the latest episodes from a show, or get recommendations based on stated interests [31][32]. The plugin was multilingual and worked alongside MixerBox's own Android and iOS apps, which the company reported had passed 300 million combined downloads by the time of the ChatGPT integration [29]. A companion plugin, MixerBox OnePlayer, overlapped with the podcasts category on the music side and could play in-chat streaming URLs [33]. MixerBox eventually ported most of its plugin lineup to the GPT Store as a family of custom GPTs.
A second podcast search plugin, sometimes referred to simply as "Podcast search," used the esne.ai domain and pulled its data from PodcastIndex.org, an open RSS-based decentralized podcast directory [34][35]. The plugin found the latest and most popular podcasts on a topic and returned clickable links. It overlapped functionally with Listen Notes and MixerBox Podcasts but differed in data source: PodcastIndex.org provides an open alternative to the proprietary catalogs maintained by Apple, Spotify, and Listen Notes itself. Contemporary reviews described the plugin as a niche option, and the developer reported intermittent issues with older ChatGPT models that struggled to parse the OpenAPI definition reliably.
Likewise is a Bellevue, Washington entertainment discovery company founded in 2018 by Larry Cohen, who runs Bill Gates's private office Gates Ventures, and Ian Morris, a former Microsoft colleague [36][37]. The company describes itself as a recommendation engine across television, film, books, and podcasts, and it was one of the first consumer brands to ship a ChatGPT plugin pitched at entertainment.
The Likewise plugin was announced on May 16, 2023 [6][7]. It connected ChatGPT to Likewise's recommendation graph and surfaced podcast suggestions alongside films, television shows, and books, plus lookups for streaming availability and ratings [6][7]. Because Likewise treated podcasts as one of four media types, podcast queries were sometimes thinner than dedicated tools such as Listen Notes, but the plugin was useful for cross-media discovery. Likewise later replaced the plugin with a standalone chatbot called Pix, announced in October 2023.
Podcasts plugins followed the same pattern as other ChatGPT plugins. Each plugin published an OpenAPI specification and a manifest file that ChatGPT used to understand which functions the plugin offered. When a user's prompt seemed to call for a plugin, the underlying large language model, generally GPT-4 for plugin-enabled conversations, invoked the relevant function with structured arguments and incorporated the response into its reply.
The typical flow for a podcast discovery plugin was:
Transcript plugins added a second layer. After the discovery step, the plugin fetched the full transcript text and returned it to ChatGPT for summarization or key-point extraction. Speechki inverted the model: instead of consuming audio, it produced audio from chat output. Most podcast plugins did not require user authentication because the underlying catalogs were public; API keys were held by the plugin developer rather than by the end user.
Podcasts plugins drew real but modest usage and bumped up against the same ceilings as the rest of the plugin store.
| Limitation | Effect |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT Plus paywall | Plugins were available only to subscribers paying $20 per month |
| Manual plugin selection | Users had to enable up to three plugins per conversation, and switch them between sessions |
| No in-chat playback | ChatGPT's interface was text-only, so plugins could return links to episodes but could not play audio in the conversation |
| Latency | Round trips between ChatGPT and external podcast APIs added noticeable delays |
| Catalog gaps | Each plugin reflected its own data source; no plugin covered all podcasts |
| Geographic restrictions | Some podcast catalogs and audio services were not available in every region where ChatGPT operated |
The lack of in-chat audio playback was the most acute pain point. A user could ask Listen Notes for a podcast and click through to the episode page, but the listening experience always happened in another tab or app. Several developers, including MixerBox and Speechki, attempted to soften this by returning streaming URLs or embeddable audio players, but the gap between conversational discovery and actual listening remained. Detailed usage figures for podcast plugins were not generally published, and aggregated impressions from contemporary reporting suggest the podcast vertical sat well behind travel, shopping, and productivity in the directory and roughly on par with the music plugins category in attention.
The podcast category wound down on the same schedule as the rest of the program. After OpenAI announced Custom GPTs in November 2023 and opened the GPT Store in January 2024, the plugin store closed to new conversations on March 19, 2024, with existing plugin conversations ending on April 9, 2024 [12].
Most active podcast plugin developers ported their experiences to the new GPT format:
| Original plugin | Migration target | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Listen Notes | Listen Notes-style podcast search GPTs | Source code archived on GitHub; PodcastAPI.com continued to power third-party GPTs |
| shownotes | shownotes Custom GPT | Same Whisper-based transcript backend |
| Speechki | Speechki Custom GPT | Same multi-voice catalog, expanded post-plugin |
| MixerBox Podcasts | MixerBox Podcasts Custom GPT | Joined the broader MixerBox family of GPTs |
| Likewise | Pix standalone chatbot | Likewise pivoted to its own AI chatbot rather than a GPT |
The move from plugins to GPTs preserved most podcast functionality while changing the technical surface. Plugins exposed structured function calls through OpenAPI manifests; GPTs use a similar mechanism called "actions" but bundle them with custom instructions, knowledge files, and configurable starter prompts. From a user's perspective, a Custom GPT did not need to be "enabled" inside a conversation: each GPT was its own dedicated chat reachable through the GPT Store.
Podcasts ChatGPT plugins were a short-lived but instructive episode in the history of conversational interfaces for audio media. They showed that natural language prompts could be a workable front end for podcast discovery, that transcript-based summarization could compress hours of audio into readable notes within seconds, and that text to speech could be paired with chat to generate spoken content on demand. They also exposed the limits of that model: the absence of in-chat playback, the friction of separate plugin slots, and the difficulty of monetising plugins behind a paid subscription. Surviving services such as Listen Notes, shownotes, MixerBox, and Speechki continued as standalone web products and as Custom GPTs.