Sermon to Text — Turn a Recording Into a Transcript
Upload the sermon you already recorded and get the words back, timestamped and searchable, in about five minutes. 99% accuracy on clear audio. Your first full sermon is free, up to 90 minutes, with no credit card.
Turnaround
~5 min / 45-min sermon
Accuracy
99% on clear audio
First sermon
Free, 90 min
Why sermons transcribe well
Transcription engines struggle most with crosstalk, mumbling and distant microphones. Preaching has almost none of those problems: one person speaking at a projected volume, usually into a microphone, for a sustained stretch. That is close to the ideal input, which is why a clean sermon recording transcribes far more accurately than a conference call of the same length.
The variable that actually decides your result is the recording, not the message. A board feed or lapel mic gets you the top of the range. A phone at the back of a reverberant sanctuary, with HVAC running, gets you the bottom. If you have both, upload the board feed.
From recording to transcript
- 1
Get the sermon as a file
Soundboard export, podcast MP3, livestream download, camera card, phone recording — anything that ends up as a file on a computer or phone. The closer the microphone was to the preacher, the better the result.
- 2
Open the uploader
Go to /transcribe and drag the file into the upload zone, or click to browse. Files up to 150MB are accepted, audio or video, with no conversion step.
- 3
Enter an email address
One field. No password, no account setup. The email exists so you get a copy of the transcript rather than losing it if the tab closes.
- 4
Wait about five minutes
A 45-minute message finishes in roughly five minutes. The free tier covers one complete sermon up to 90 minutes — long enough for a full-length or bilingual message, not a clipped teaser.
- 5
Download the format you need
.txt to paste into a document, .srt or .vtt to caption the video, .docx with timestamps for the archive. Same outputs on the free sermon as on the paid plan.
What the text is actually for
- A blog post you did not have to write twice. The sermon is already the draft. Editing a transcript into a post is a different, much shorter job than writing one from a blank page.
- Captions. The .srt and .vtt downloads drop straight into YouTube, Vimeo or a web player.
- A searchable body of work. Years of preaching become something you can search by phrase — including your own past treatment of a passage you are preaching again.
- Accessibility and translation. Text is the starting point for anyone who cannot hear the audio and for any translation workflow.
- A book, eventually. A preaching series in text is a manuscript that already exists. See sermons into books.
Sermon-to-text FAQ
How do I turn a sermon into text?+
Upload the recording and let the transcription run. There is no software to install and no account to create: open /transcribe, drag in the MP3, M4A, WAV, MP4 or MOV, enter an email address, and the transcript comes back in about five minutes for a typical 45-minute message. Your first full sermon is free, up to 90 minutes.
How long does typing a sermon out by hand take?+
Far longer than most people expect. Transcribing by ear means repeatedly pausing, rewinding and correcting, and a 45-minute message realistically costs several hours of somebody’s week — every week. That is the arithmetic that makes automated transcription worth it for a church that preaches 52 times a year.
How accurate is sermon-to-text conversion?+
99% on clear audio. Preaching is unusually good input for a transcription engine — one speaker, projected voice, usually a microphone — so a soundboard or lapel-mic recording transcribes close to perfectly. What hurts accuracy is distance from the speaker, room reverb and background noise, not the length of the message.
What formats can I upload?+
MP3, M4A, WAV, MP4, MOV, MPEG, AAC, OGG, FLAC and WebM, up to 150MB per file. Audio and video both work — a video file is read directly, so there is no need to extract the audio track first.
What do I get back?+
A timestamped transcript on the page, a copy by email, and downloads in .txt for writing, .srt and .vtt for captions, and .docx with timestamps every 30 seconds for archiving.
Does it handle scripture references and names?+
Scripture references are detected in the transcript. Unusual proper names — a specific person in the congregation, a local place, a less common theological term — are the most likely thing to need a quick pass by eye afterwards, which is true of every transcription engine.
What does it cost after the free sermon?+
The Church Plan is $5 first month, then $19/month for unlimited sermons, or $48 every 3 months if you prefer quarterly billing. One account covers the whole church; there is no per-seat charge and no monthly minute cap.
Try it on one sermon
One complete sermon free, up to 90 minutes, no card. After that, $5 first month, then $19/month for unlimited sermons.
Upload a sermon