Technology ChatGPT Plugins
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See also: ChatGPT Plugins, ChatGPT Plugin Categories and Technology
Technology ChatGPT Plugins were the group of third-party extensions in the ChatGPT Plugins store that focused on technology news, software documentation, repository search, and general developer or technologist utilities. They sat alongside, and sometimes overlapped with, the more strictly developer-oriented Software Development ChatGPT Plugins and Programming ChatGPT Plugins groupings used by community directories during the plugin era. The category covered tools that surfaced industry headlines, fetched live reference material from documentation sites, queried code hosts such as GitHub, and produced media artefacts like text to speech audio.
The category existed for roughly thirteen months. It opened with the launch of plugins on March 23, 2023, expanded rapidly through the broader beta rollout that began on May 12, 2023, and disappeared after OpenAI closed the plugin store on March 19, 2024 and shut down all remaining plugin chats on April 9, 2024. The functions provided by technology plugins were largely absorbed by Custom GPTs and the GPT Store, which used a similar action and OpenAPI mechanism to call out to external services.
When ChatGPT launched plugins on March 23, 2023, the initial alpha included thirteen partners: Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, KAYAK, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, Zapier, and a knowledge base retrieval plugin open sourced by OpenAI. OpenAI also hosted two first party plugins itself, a web browser and Code Interpreter. Wolfram was the most overtly technical of the launch group, giving the GPT-4 backed chat the ability to call Wolfram Alpha and Wolfram Language for computation, curated knowledge, and real time data. Zapier was likewise widely used by technologists because it bridged ChatGPT to thousands of software as a service products. [1] [2]
Access in the first weeks was gated behind a waitlist for ChatGPT Plus subscribers and developers. OpenAI moved plugins from alpha to a wider Plus beta starting the week of May 12, 2023, at which point more than seventy third party plugins were available, with the count rising to roughly two hundred by late May, around four hundred by mid 2023, eight hundred by August 5, 2023, and over nine hundred by the time community directories stopped indexing the store. Many of the new entries were technology focused because the OpenAPI based plugin format suited developer minded teams that already had a public API. [3] [6]
Directories of the period, including plugin.surf, gptstore.ai, whatplugin.ai, and Orren Prunckun's running list on Medium, classified plugins into loose buckets such as travel, shopping, finance, productivity, education, and technology. The technology bucket itself was not formally defined by OpenAI; it emerged from how third party catalogues grouped plugins whose primary subject was the tech industry, programming ecosystems, or the wider craft of building software. The Speechki plugin already documented in this article fit alongside that group as a media technology utility. [3] [4]
The table below lists technology category plugins that can be cross checked through at least two contemporaneous sources. Release dates are taken from plugin store registration records as preserved by directory archives. Where an entry only appears in a single directory it has been omitted.
| Plugin | Type | First listed | Function | Developer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Speechki (ChatGPT Plugin) | Audio media | May 20, 2023 | Converts text into ready to use audio with download link, audio player page, or embed code | Speechki, speechki.org |
| Wolfram | Compute and data | March 23, 2023 | Wolfram Alpha and Wolfram Language access for math, curated knowledge, and real time data | Wolfram Research |
| Zapier | Integration | March 23, 2023 | Connects ChatGPT to thousands of apps through Zapier workflows | Zapier |
| TechPulse | Tech news aggregator | June 20, 2023 | Fetches top, new, ask, show, and job stories from Hacker News with hyperlinked results | Roberts at aigenprompt.com |
| AI News Roundup | Tech news aggregator | June 20, 2023 | Returns a clickable roundup of the day's artificial intelligence headlines | Orren Prunckun |
| Man of Many | Tech and lifestyle news | June 2023 | Surfaces product, culture, and style stories from the Man of Many publication | Man of Many |
| DEV Community | Developer community | 2023 | Searches the DEV Community Forem for posts, members, learning resources, and collaborators | Forem, the publisher of dev.to |
| Repo Radar | GitHub search | June 20, 2023 | Searches GitHub by topic, language, or name and returns README content | reporadar developer |
| AskTheCode | Repository question and answer | 2023 | Asks questions about a GitHub repository's source code through chat | Dmytro Somok |
| Repo Inspector | Repository analysis | 2023 | Inspects a Git repository link, returning details on commits, contributors, and languages | Independent developer |
| FreshTech | Tech documentation | 2023 | Pulls the latest tech documentation pages from specified sources | Independent developer |
| Show Me Diagrams | Diagram generation | June 2023 | Renders Mermaid syntax diagrams inside the chat for technical concepts | bra1nDump (Kirill Dubovitskiy) |
This list is not exhaustive. Several plugins that occasionally appeared in technology category lists, such as Crunchbase data lookups or specific company plugins, are excluded because their store registration could not be cross referenced.
Speechki is the entry that originally seeded this article and was the only plugin with a direct text to audio purpose in the technology grouping. The Speechki team announced the plugin on the OpenAI developer forum on May 3, 2023, while approval was still pending, and the plugin was added to the store on May 20, 2023. It supported GPT-4 backed chats and exposed three delivery options: a downloadable audio link, a hosted audio player page, and an embed snippet that could be dropped into a website. The team described its longer roadmap on the same forum thread, including language and voice selection, audio cataloguing, playlist creation, multi voice narration, podcast tools, and an audio content marketplace with creator revenue opportunities. Reviews on Product Hunt placed the plugin at fourth most upvoted of the month for June 2023. [7] [8]
Later in the plugin's life Speechki added support for hundreds of voices across dozens of languages, with users reporting variable quality outside English, and the company listed the plugin as the only approved text to audio solution in the store.
Wolfram Research's plugin was the technology category's earliest and most visible launch entry. Stephen Wolfram described the integration in a March 2023 essay, framing it as a way to give ChatGPT what he called Wolfram superpowers: deterministic computation, structured data, and access to Wolfram Alpha's curated knowledge base. The plugin was called automatically by the model when a query needed mathematics, scientific data, finance figures, or symbolic manipulation that the underlying large language model was unlikely to handle reliably on its own.
In April 2023 Wolfram followed up with the Wolfram ChatGPT Plugin Kit, a notebook driven environment for spinning up custom plugins backed by the Wolfram Cloud. The kit reduced plugin authorship for technologists who already worked in Wolfram Language to a few cells of code. Many other plugins later borrowed elements of this design, in particular the convention of pairing a clearly typed OpenAPI surface with a plain English description for the model. [5]
Zapier's plugin let ChatGPT trigger Zaps that connected to over five thousand applications, including Gmail, Slack, Google Sheets, HubSpot, Trello, Microsoft Teams, and Salesforce. For technologists it acted as a glue layer, enabling chat driven automations that would otherwise require custom code or webhook plumbing. Zapier later sunset the ChatGPT plugin in line with OpenAI's deprecation schedule and pointed users at Zapier's actions for Custom GPTs as the successor.
Three tech news plugins clustered around the same June 2023 window. TechPulse wrapped Hacker News, exposing five commands matching its sections: fetchTopStories, fetchNewStories, fetchAskStories, fetchShowStories, and fetchJobStories. The manifest carried a description for the model that emphasised personalised image links accompanying featured stories. The author was Roberts at aigenprompt.com, the same publisher behind a small portfolio of related plugins. [4]
AI News Roundup retrieved a daily summary of the day's artificial intelligence headlines through a single getHeadline command, returning JSON containing a list of clickable links. It was published by Orren Prunckun, who also maintained a public list of approved ChatGPT plugins through 2023.
Man of Many was launched by the Australian men's lifestyle publisher of the same name and was reported as the first ChatGPT plugin from a major publisher. It surfaced editorial content covering products, culture, and style. While not strictly a developer focused plugin, it consistently appeared in tech and news clusters because its catalogue leaned heavily on consumer technology coverage.
A second cluster of technology plugins overlapped with the software development ChatGPT plugins and programming ChatGPT plugins groupings. DEV Community connected ChatGPT to dev.to, the public Forem instance run by DEV. Users could search posts, find collaborators, and surface learning resources without leaving the chat. Repo Radar focused on GitHub repository discovery, allowing searches by topic, language, or repository name and returning README content for any matching project, which the model could then use to write code likely to compile against that repository's interfaces. AskTheCode narrowed the scope further, letting a user paste a GitHub repository URL and then ask natural language questions about the code base. Initial coverage centred on C# projects, with broader language support added later. Repo Inspector offered a more analytical lens, summarising commits, contributors, and language breakdowns for any HTTPS Git URL.
FreshTech sat at the documentation end of the spectrum, fetching the latest pages from named documentation sources to keep the chat aware of changes in libraries and APIs that post dated the model's training data. Show Me Diagrams, by Kirill Dubovitskiy, took a different angle, rendering Mermaid syntax diagrams inline in chat for sequence diagrams, flow charts, and entity relationship sketches. It was widely used by technical writers, system designers, and educators.
Every plugin in the technology category followed the same specification. A plugin manifest at /.well-known/ai-plugin.json declared the plugin's name for humans and for the model, a contact email, an authentication scheme, a logo, legal information, and a pointer to an OpenAPI specification. The OpenAPI document, in either YAML or JSON form, defined each available endpoint, its parameters, and its expected response. ChatGPT consumed the manifest when a user installed the plugin and used the OpenAPI description to construct calls. Many plugins, including TechPulse and AI News Roundup, used no authentication; others, such as Zapier, required user authentication.
The OpenAPI lineage carried over directly into Custom GPTs when OpenAI introduced them on November 6, 2023. Custom GPT actions reused the OpenAPI specification convention, which is why most surviving plugin authors were able to migrate their backends with comparatively small changes. Prompt engineering practices that emerged in the plugin era, particularly the description for model field that nudged the chat toward calling the right tool at the right time, also carried over into action descriptions.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| March 23, 2023 | OpenAI launches ChatGPT Plugins in alpha with thirteen launch partners including Wolfram and Zapier |
| April 27, 2023 | Stephen Wolfram publishes the Wolfram ChatGPT Plugin Kit, simplifying technology plugin authorship |
| May 3, 2023 | Speechki announces its plugin on the OpenAI developer forum |
| May 12, 2023 | OpenAI begins broader beta rollout; over seventy plugins available to all ChatGPT Plus users |
| May 20, 2023 | Speechki listed in the plugin store |
| June 2023 | Man of Many launches as first major publisher plugin; DEV Community plugin documented in tutorials |
| June 20, 2023 | TechPulse, Repo Radar, and AI News Roundup added to plugin store |
| August 5, 2023 | Plugin store grows to roughly eight hundred entries across all categories |
| November 6, 2023 | OpenAI announces Custom GPTs, the eventual replacement for plugins |
| January 10, 2024 | GPT Store opens |
| March 19, 2024 | Plugin store closes; new plugin installs and new chats with plugins disabled |
| April 9, 2024 | All remaining plugin chats shut down; ChatGPT Plugins fully retired |
OpenAI announced the deprecation of ChatGPT Plugins in early 2024, citing the broader capability of Custom GPTs as the reason for consolidation. After March 19, 2024 no new plugins could be installed and no new conversations could be started against existing plugins. Existing chats continued to function through April 9, 2024, after which the plugin runtime was fully retired. Most technology plugin authors either rebuilt their integrations as Custom GPT actions, redirected users to a standalone web product, or shut down the integration. Zapier published a migration page pointing users at the new GPT Store entry, while Wolfram positioned the Wolfram GPT in the GPT Store as the direct successor to its plugin.
The legacy of the technology category is mainly architectural. The pairing of an OpenAPI surface with a description for model now underpins Custom GPTs and a wider movement of tool calling integrations across large language model products. Plugins also acted as a testbed for ideas that later matured: tech news aggregation by chat, code base question and answer, diagram generation, repository search, and documentation lookups.