Church and ministry transcription

A Sunday sermon. A midweek Bible study or cell group. A board, elders or finance meeting. A conference or camp meeting. Edited church video and livestreams for captions. Devotionals, podcasts and pastoral interviews. Sunday school or catechism teaching.

Send them as audio or video, up to 1 GB per order, or paste a YouTube, Google Drive or Dropbox link. Tell us which kind of recording it is when you upload, and the transcript is edited to suit it: a sermon is not formatted like a committee meeting.

A sermon is not a meeting. The preacher repeats a line three times for emphasis, the congregation answers, a verse is quoted from memory and paraphrased a minute later. We keep all of that, because it is what was said and it is what the recording is worth.

Scripture references are written as they were spoken, in standard form such as Romans 8:28, and only when the speaker gave them. We do not look the verse up and paste it in, and we do not replace a speaker's paraphrase with the wording of a Bible translation. If a reference is misstated, it is transcribed as said and flagged for you.

Meaningful repetition stays. Fillers do not: as everywhere on the site, every word is kept and only hesitation sounds such as um, uh, er and hmm are left out.

Church audio goes through exactly the same check as every other recording on the site: a grade from A to D, based on how clearly the words can be recognised, background noise, recording level, distortion and overlapping speakers. There is no separate church grade, and no shortcut.

A lapel microphone or a clean soundboard feed usually grades A or B and costs the standard rate. A phone recording from the pew, a reverberant sanctuary or a busy question-and-answer session can grade C or D, and then only that recording costs 30% or 70% more. Your quote shows each file's grade and the reason before you pay.

Congregational responses are one of the things that make church audio harder to transcribe: many short turns look like crosstalk to any grader. We would rather quote that honestly up front than surprise you after you have paid.

Our published rate is for English recordings. Many Kenyan services move between English and Kiswahili, sometimes inside one sentence. We transcribe what is said in the language it was said in — we do not translate — but Kiswahili is not yet supported by our automated first draft, so those recordings are checked by a person before we quote them.

Send a short sample if you are unsure. We will tell you what we can deliver and what it costs before you pay, and we will say no if we cannot do it well.

Order Captions and you get SRT or WebVTT files timed to the video, ready for YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo or your own player. Lines are split short enough to read comfortably, speaker changes are marked where they matter, and sounds such as [applause] or [music] are captioned.

We do not burn captions into the video, and we do not translate them.

One file can hold a testimony about someone's health, a prayer request naming a family, or children on stage. Send recordings you have the right to record and to have transcribed, and make sure the people in them are content for that. We do not obtain consent from your congregation on your behalf, and we do not publish, resell or reuse your recordings.

Children are often audible: a Sunday school class, a children's choir, a dedication. Their parents' or guardians' consent is yours to obtain, as it is for everyone else recorded. Recordings with children are never used as samples or in our marketing; the sample on this page is invented.

A sermon, a testimony or a prayer can reveal what someone believes, and data protection law treats religious belief as sensitive. We handle it as we handle health and legal recordings: used only for your order, and never used to train AI models.

Files are stored privately, only the people working on your order can open them, and audio and video are deleted after 90 days, or sooner if you ask. Tick the NDA box when you upload and our confidentiality agreement arrives by email for you to accept.