Sermon Transcription FAQ

Two ways to try it without committing. Your first full sermon — up to 90 minutes — is transcribed free with no credit card at all. If you want to run a few weeks of sermons through it before deciding, your first month of the Church Plan is $5 (normally $19), unlimited sermons, cancel anytime.

The Church Plan is $19/month and covers unlimited full-length sermons — about $4.40 each if you publish weekly. There is also a quarterly plan at $48 (3 months). Your first full sermon is transcribed free, no credit card required. Right now your first month is $5, then $19/month — cancel anytime.

Yes. Every new account gets one complete sermon transcribed free — up to 90 minutes — with no credit card required. After that, the Church Plan is $19/month for unlimited sermons. Right now your first month is $5, then $19/month — cancel anytime.

No. There are no setup fees and no contracts — the Church Plan is month to month and you can cancel anytime. Your first full sermon is free, with no credit card required.

The Church Plan is already a flat $19/month for unlimited sermons, which undercuts per-minute services by a wide margin at church volumes. For multi-site or denomination-wide rollouts, contact hello@sermon-transcription.com for custom pricing.

Yes, substantially. Rev.com charges $1.50/min for human transcription or $0.25/min for AI, so one 45-minute sermon runs $67.50 or $11.25. The Church Plan is $19/month for unlimited sermons — about $4.40 per sermon if you publish weekly — and your first sermon is free.

Sermons are transcribed by ElevenLabs Scribe v2, one of the most accurate models on the independent Artificial Analysis speech-to-text leaderboard as of September 2026, with OpenAI Whisper as a fallback. Every book of the Bible and common theological terms are passed to the engine as key terms, so scripture references come through intact. On clear audio (a soundboard feed or a decent room mic) that means 99% accuracy; livestream encoding, distant mics and background music lower it.

Yes. Modern AI transcription handles standard theological terminology (sanctification, propitiation, justification, imputation) and Bible book names (Habakkuk, Ecclesiastes, Zephaniah) accurately. For unusual proper nouns, we use prompt seeding to bias accuracy.

AI transcription tolerates reasonable noise, but the best accuracy comes from a lapel mic close to the speaker. If your audio has heavy noise, music bleed, or multiple overlapping speakers, expect more cleanup — re-recording from the soundboard feed usually helps more than anything we can do downstream.

Yes. It handles quiet passages, prayers, and pastoral asides as long as they're audibly captured by the recording.

MP3, MP4, WAV, M4A, MOV, AAC, FLAC, OGG, WebM, and most other major audio and video container formats. If a standard player can play it, we can transcribe it.

Uploads are limited to 150 MB per file on every plan — comfortably enough for a full-length sermon recording. On the free tier the limit that matters is transcript length (up to 90 minutes), not file size.

Every transcription downloads as plain text (.txt), SubRip (.srt) and WebVTT (.vtt) captions. Any sermon in your library also exports as a Word or Markdown document, and the Monday Kit bundles the transcript, the Sermon Pack and every tool result into one file.

Not currently. Transcripts are continuous text with word-level timestamps, which suits single-preacher sermons. Speaker diarization is not offered today.

Yes. The verbose JSON response includes timestamps for every individual word, enabling karaoke-style captions, exact-quote linking, and rapid clip extraction.

They live in your sermon library at /dashboard. Every transcript and Sermon Pack is kept for as long as you subscribe, and free sermons are kept too — nothing expires after 24 hours. The email you receive links straight to that sermon's page, so you can always get back to it.

Every sermon page can export to Word, TXT, SRT, VTT and Markdown, or print to PDF.

15 tools generated from each transcript: Bulletin Summary — a ~120-word summary for the bulletin or newsletter, plus a one-line version; 5-Day Devotional — a Monday-through-Friday devotional (passage, reflection, question, prayer) drawn from the sermon; Social Media Posts — 5 social posts built on the preacher’s strongest lines; Scripture References — every passage cited or quoted, in order, with the point it supports; Titles & Description — 5 title options plus a description for YouTube or a podcast; Follow-up Email — a midweek congregation email with a recap, one application and one question; Key Quotes — the 10 most quotable moments with timestamps, for clips and graphics; Kids & Family Guide — the big idea in a child’s words, a story and 3 dinner-table questions; Ask Your Sermon — a Q&A chat grounded only in the transcript; Small-Group Study Guide — a leader guide with an icebreaker, passages, 6-8 questions with leader notes and a weekly challenge; Illustration Bank — every story or analogy the preacher used, timestamped, with the point it made and reuse tags; Prayer Points — 8-12 prayer prompts under Praise, Confession, Asking and Commitment; Chapters & Timestamps — YouTube-style chapter markers timestamped straight from the sermon; YouTube Description — a title, description, chapters, Scriptures cited and hashtags, ready to paste in; Slide Outline — a slide-by-slide outline ready to paste into ProPresenter or Keynote. Bulletin Summary runs on your free sermon; the rest come with the Church Plan.

Yes. Every sermon page has a share toggle that publishes a clean, public notes page — title, big idea, outline, Scriptures cited and (on the Church Plan) discussion questions or the full transcript, your choice. It's revocable any time, marked noindex so it doesn't compete with your own site in search, and never shows your notes, email or file name. Good for small groups, the deaf/HoH ministry, or anyone who missed the service.

Yes. Every sermon is scanned for Scripture references automatically, and your dashboard has a Scripture index across your whole library — every book you've preached, sorted by how often, with a link to every sermon that cited it. Handy for spotting which books you haven't covered in a while.

90+ languages including Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Mandarin, Tagalog, Haitian Creole, French, German, Italian, Russian, Arabic, and more.

Yes — the engine auto-detects the spoken language, so bilingual congregations can upload English and Spanish services without changing any setting.

Transcription captures speech in its original language. For translation, pair the English transcript with DeepL, ChatGPT, or Claude. We're working on integrated multilingual output for a future release.

A 45-minute sermon completes in 3–5 minutes. A 90-minute service typically takes 6–10 minutes. We process audio at roughly 10× real-time speed.

Not yet — the current service is batch-only. Sermon Transcription processes recorded audio. For live captioning, look at YouTube auto-captions or Otter.ai's live stream feature, then re-caption with a proper SRT post-event.

Both. Solo pastors building sermon archives, multisite networks needing standardized output, and seminaries archiving lectures all use the service. Pricing scales linearly with usage.

Absolutely. Sermon podcasters use it for show notes, chapter markers, episode SEO, and accessible transcripts. The cost is the same: episodes are covered by the flat $19/month Church Plan, with no per-episode charge.

Digitize the recordings to MP3 or WAV, then upload. Because the Church Plan is unlimited, an archive of hundreds of old sermons costs the same $19 as a single Sunday — most churches do the whole back-catalogue in one month.

Yes. Audio is processed once and deleted from our servers within 24 hours of completion. Transcripts are retained on your account until you delete them. We never share audio or transcripts with third parties.

No. We operate under OpenAI enterprise API terms that explicitly exclude API inputs from model training. Your sermons are not used to train anyone's models.

Yes. Audio is processed in-region where possible, deleted within 24 hours, and never sold. We respond to data deletion requests within 30 days. Full privacy policy at our /privacy page.

You do. The transcript is a derivative of the original audio recording, which is owned by the speaker (pastor) and/or the church. Our terms of service do not claim any ownership of your transcripts.

Legally, the speaker holds copyright on their spoken work. Transcribing for internal church archive purposes is widely accepted under fair use. For public republishing, get the speaker's written permission.

Worship music typically requires CCLI or similar licensing for reproduction. Public-domain hymns can be freely transcribed. For commercial music, transcripts of lyrics may still fall under copyright.

Yes. SRT and VTT output upload directly to YouTube, Vimeo, and HTML5 video players as closed captions, meeting WCAG 2.1 Level AA captioning requirements.

Yes — and this is one of the biggest reasons churches subscribe. Full transcripts serve members who prefer reading; closed captions on video serve those watching with sound off or with hearing loss.

Yes. Most churches paste the transcript directly into their CMS as a blog post — transcripts export as clean, formatted text that drops straight into any website editor.

Yes — the Sermon Transcription API is the same API powering our web UI. See our API documentation page for endpoints, authentication, and code samples.

Yes. The web UI supports drag-and-drop of multiple files. For large archive projects (hundreds of sermons), the API is the cleaner path.

Otter.ai is built for meetings — speed and live captioning. Sermon Transcription is built for sermons — theological vocabulary, scripture references, batch-quality output, and a flat $19/month for unlimited sermons instead of seat-based subscription plans.

Rev.com is general-purpose transcription billed per minute. Sermon Transcription is church-specific — theological accuracy and sermon-optimized AI prompts — on a flat $19/month for unlimited sermons instead of per-minute billing.

Descript is a transcription-aware video editor — best if you want to edit video and audio by editing text. Sermon Transcription is a pure transcription service: simpler, faster, and dramatically cheaper for archive workflows.