I’ve done question-and-answer sermons for years. Those are the sermons where people in the congregation write their questions on cards, and the worship leaders give extemporaneous answers to the questions — without any advance preparation.
Another thing I’ve been doing for years is sending the texts of my sermons to anyone who asks for them, such as people who are shut in and can’t make it to the service, or people who simply prefer to see a printed text. With livestreamed services, there is less demand for printed texts of sermons, but there are still one or two people who like to have them.
I’ve never tried to come up with a printed text for a question-and-answer sermon before. But this year I thought I’d give it a try. I randomly picked one of the many online transcription services. I tried Any Transcribe, which uses a combination of voice recognition and generative AI to come up with a transcript; this service is currently offered for no monetary charge (though I’m sure they steal whatever data I give them).
It generated a pretty good transcript. But it then took me about 90 minutes to clean up the transcript so that it was a readable text. Cleaning up included removing repetitions, adding paragraph breaks, fixing punctuation, and clarifying those passages that did not translate well to print. If you want to see it, I’ve posted the resulting text on my sermon website. If you’re into this kind of thing, you can also compare the edited transcript with the livestream recording (that recording will be taken down soon, as per our congregation’s usual practice of only leaving recordings up for 3-4 weeks).
Some observations from this process: (1) The transcription generated by the Any Transcribe service requires substantial editing; their voice recognition is pretty good, and the AI helps clean up lacunae in the voice recognition; but it’s far from perfect. (2) AI can not yet replace a good human editor. (3) As always, extemporaneous spoken word does not always translate well to the printed word. (4) Question-and-answer sermons are a lot of fun in the moment, but transcribing one of them is probably not a good use of anyone’s time (nor is it a good use of AI, considering the carbon footprint that results).