Transcribe a sermon

In an account — free or Pro, with the same features — the transcript comes with:

The sermon as text, with the time

Click any line to hear that passage; the transcript follows the audio while it plays.

Editing in the text itself

Fix the names of people and places, and the chapter and verse, where they sit, while the passage plays.

Export and captions

Word (DOCX), TXT, SRT and VTT, on every plan. Word or TXT for the website and the printed copy, SRT or VTT as captions for the video — or burn the captions into the video itself. Burning captions into a video works on every plan, Free included, for recordings up to your plan's file length and 2 hours at most; each month an account can make 20 such videos, 600 minutes of video in all, and a finished video is kept for 7 days.

Translation

Translate the transcript into another language for members who worship in it, and read it beside the original before it is shared.

A summary of the message

A sermon is usually summarised as a talk: the key concepts, the definitions given, and the examples and stories used. You can pick a different shape if that shape does not fit.

Every automatic transcript has errors, and they cluster on proper names, numbers and technical terms. Before you quote a passage, click the line and listen: with a time on every word, that check takes seconds. In a sermon that is scripture: a reference heard as the wrong book, chapter or verse reads as plausibly as the right reference, and a name from the text is spelt as the recogniser guessed. Check each reference against the audio before publishing.

Singing, the band and the congregation's responses are transcribed as whatever words the recogniser hears in them. Trim the file to the sermon before you upload, or cut those passages from the text afterwards. A preacher who moves away from the microphone comes back in fragments for those minutes.

You can also record in the browser, on a phone or a computer. Keep the page open and the screen on until you stop: a browser can end a recording when the page goes into the background.

Without an account, the trial transcribes up to the first 10 minutes of a recording. On Pro, each file can be up to 8 hours, within the month's included hours; what each plan includes, the pricing page shows. See plans and prices.

On long recordings, speaker labels can wander from one section to the next — a consequence of how long audio is processed, not a setting.

Name the main language rather than leaving it on automatic. Automatic detection has to decide what language each stretch of speech is in, and where a recording switches language, what was said in the other one may come back translated instead of transcribed — or not come back at all. Either way nothing is marked as missing: the transcript will look complete.

Philippine English is marked “preview” in the language list: offered, but without a quality commitment yet, so check its transcript more closely before you use it.