Sermons and Transcripts
Today we’re announcing another addition to our new website: sermon videos and transcripts. Sermons are being uploaded to our YouTube channel, and mostly-AI-generated transcripts are being uploaded to our website and will be included in the weekly email. (If you haven’t been getting our weekly email, check your spam filter or contact the office to verify your email address!)
Geeky Details
(Warning: the following is extremely geeky.)
I say that the transcripts are “mostly-AI-generated” because they are run through a speech-to-text model (for geeks: whisper.cpp running the ggml-large-v3 model) to extract the text from the audio, and then I pass them through another AI model (X.AI’s grok-2-1212) to clean up the text, insert punctuation and paragraph breaks, and eliminate the verbal fillers and pauses that are found in most live recordings. That model outputs the sermon in Markdown format and also provides suggestions for titles and summaries.
While I do a quick skim of the text to make sure there’s nothing seriously amiss, it’s still possible that there are errors in the transcription or editing process. If you notice something badly wrong and important enough to need manual editing, let me know.
Why do this?
Well, there are a few reasons:
Making the transcripts available online gives people an opportunity to go back and read if they want to dive into something more deeply.
It makes our website more rich in content, which improves its rankings in search engines.
I am already using this process to reflect on improving my preaching, so I might as well turn this process to other good purposes at the same time.
I hope these transcripts are helpful for everyone!
