Sermon transcription
Sunday’s message can become a blog post, a small group guide, captions on the service video and a printed copy for members who missed it. Each one starts from the preacher’s own words, as text your team can edit.
Transcribe a recording
Launching November 2026
One sermon, three things to publish
Upload the message, or the whole service
A sermon-only file gives cleaner chapters. Send the full service and you also get announcements and songs, which you can delete.
Fix names and references
Find and replace corrects a name, a place or a book of the Bible everywhere at once. Turn "first Corinthians" into "1 Corinthians" in one step.
Draft the blog post
Export DOCX and edit it into a post. Preaching repeats on purpose and wanders a little, so cut the asides, take headings from the chapter list, and keep the strongest lines as they were preached.
Build a study guide
Make each chapter a section and add two or three discussion questions under it for small groups to work through.
Caption the service video
Export SRT or VTT and upload it with the video on YouTube, Vimeo or Facebook. Captions reach people who watch muted and members who are hard of hearing.
Chapters and application points
One run produces a summary, timed chapters and action items. In a sermon those action items read more like application points; keep the ones that fit and rewrite the rest.
- Welcome and the reading
- The parable of the lost coin
- What searching looks like this week
- Closing prayer
That list is a made-up example to show the format.
Sermons for a multilingual congregation
If your church worships in more than one language, Unlimited ($20 a month, fair use up to 720 hours a month) translates a finished transcript into 100+ languages. A Spanish-speaking group can read the English message, or the other way round.
Transcribe to English, also on Unlimited, turns a message preached in another language into an English transcript with the same timestamps and speakers. Translations are for reading. Have a fluent member check them before you print, especially Scripture, where people expect a specific translation. The languages page lists all 100 languages we transcribe.
A sermon archive you can search
Keep each series in its own folder and tag files by preacher, book or season. Search then finds every time a passage or theme came up, across years of messages.
Hour packs suit a church that posts one message a week. A 20-hour pack costs $15 and lasts 12 months, enough for 40 sermons of 30 minutes. Packs and paid plans take files up to 10 hours, so a long Easter service with music still goes up as one file.
If your messages run under an hour, the Free plan may be enough: 3 files a day, each up to 60 minutes. Compare the plans before you pick.
Prayer requests, names and what to leave out
Services include things that don’t belong on the website: a prayer request with a member’s name, an update about someone in the hospital, a child’s name at a dedication. Read the transcript before anything goes out, and cut those lines from the post, the guide and the captions.
The recording itself is never sent to any AI company, and you can delete the file once the post is up. If your church records counseling or pastoral conversations, think hard before uploading them at all. That’s a call for your leadership, not a setting in an app.
Clearer audio, cleaner sermon text
- Record from the soundboard feed if you can. A phone in the pews hears coughs, kids and the air conditioning.
- Ask guest speakers to say their name at the start, then fix the spelling everywhere with find and replace.
- Readings come out as spoken. If you print a set Bible translation, paste the verse from that translation.
- A panel or Q&A after the message gets up to 4 voices labeled. See speaker identification.
Sermon transcription questions
Can I turn a sermon into a blog post?
Yes. Export the transcript as DOCX and edit it down. Most sermons need trimming and headings to read well as a post, and the chapter list hands you the headings.
Will it get Bible references right?
Usually close, but book names and verse numbers are where mistakes show up. Find and replace fixes a reference across the whole transcript at once.
Can we caption our livestream?
Not live. We work on recordings, so caption the replay instead: export SRT or VTT and upload it with the video.
Can I translate a sermon into Spanish?
Yes, on Unlimited. Translate the finished transcript into Spanish or another of the 100+ supported languages.
How long can the recording be?
Free takes files up to 60 minutes. Hour packs and paid plans let one recording run 10 hours.
Can the pastor review the transcript before it’s posted?
Yes. Send a private, read-only link, and revoke it once the post is live.
Related pages for ministry teams
- Lecture transcriptionTurn class recordings into searchable text, with chapters you can use as an outline.
- Podcast transcriptEpisode transcripts with hosts and guests labeled, plus draft chapters for show notes and YouTube.
- Subtitle generatorMake SRT and VTT caption files from video or audio, with a caption length you set.
- Video to textGet a transcript or SRT and VTT subtitles from MP4, MOV, MKV and other video files.
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