Sermon transcription for churches Every word you preached, kept exactly as you said it.
Faithful transcripts with every scripture found, plus small group guides and clips from the same message. For a fraction of what a human transcriber charges.
Your first sermon is free · No credit card
What it costs
Human transcription runs about $1.50 a minute. We don’t.
A transcription service bills every minute of every sermon, then makes you wait a day or two. SermonKeep is a flat monthly plan, and the transcript is ready the same morning.
- A 45-minute sermon, by a person
- ≈ $68 · 1–2 days
- The same sermon on SermonKeep Pastor
- ≈ $1.80 · same morning
How much would your church save?
Your church saves
$2,952 a year
91% less than paying a transcription service
What you pay with SermonKeep
$24 /month
Pastor plan · $288 a year
Instead of a transcription service
$270 /month
$3,240 a year at $1.50 a minute
Human rates are typically $1–3 per audio minute; we use a conservative $1.50. SermonKeep uses the smallest plan that covers your hours.
Faithful to the original
It transcribes. It never writes.
Not a summary and not a rewrite: the sermon exactly as it was preached. When a word is unclear, you choose, with the audio one click away.
If it were noised throughout the city of Chicago that St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, were to speak in this church this morning, there would not be room to contain the crowds that would rush in.
For these words were written by the man Peter, who was indeed a great saint and who was worthy of the appellation “saint,” which is always prefixed to his name.
Peter was among the first disciples who turned to Jesus when John the Baptist pointed and said, behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world. And Peter was the first apostle called by our Lord to follow him.
“Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”
“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
“…about three thousand were added to the believers that day.”
Tozer never names three of these out loud. SermonKeep catches the allusion anyway.
Real output: A. W. Tozer, “1 Peter, Part 1” (public-domain recording), transcribed with SermonKeep.
Word for word, never paraphrased
The whole sermon with timestamps, and speakers if you want them. Click any paragraph to hear that moment.
Every scripture, even the unspoken ones
Quotes and allusions are found and listed with the full verse beside the moment you used it.
You make the call on unclear words
Obvious misrecognitions are fixed and listed so you can undo them. Anything uncertain waits for you.
More from every message
One sermon. A whole week of material.
A transcriber hands you text and stops there. SermonKeep keeps going: everything below is built from what you actually preached, one click when you need it.
- Summary and outline The main points and applications, with every transcript.
- Small group guide Discussion questions ready before Wednesday night.
- Suggested clips The most quotable moments, timestamped for reels and shorts.
- YouTube and podcast notes Description, chapters and tags. Paste and publish.
Export any of it as PDF, Word or plain text.
Guides: repurpose sermon content · sermon clips · sermon discussion questions · turn a sermon into a blog post
Pricing
Less than $2.50 a sermon. On every plan.
Your first sermon is free. Switch or cancel anytime.
Pastor
$24 /month
About $1.85 a sermon
For a church or a pastor preaching once or twice a week.
- 10 hours of audio a month (about 13 sermons)
- Transcripts with timestamps and scripture references
- Clips, small group guides and YouTube descriptions
- Unlimited team members · PDF, Word and text export
Church
$49 /month
About $1.48 a sermon
For churches with several services, studies or campuses.
- 25 hours of audio a month (about 33 sermons)
- Everything in Pastor
- Room for every service, study and class you record
Have years of sermons on YouTube?
We can process your back catalog too. Ask us about archive pricing.
Before you choose
How sermon transcription works, honestly.
SermonKeep transcribes with AssemblyAI’s speech recognition, and then adds what sermons need: a dictionary of biblical names and doctrinal terms, and a review pass that fixes obvious misrecognitions and asks you about the rest. Here’s how that works, and how we compare.
How sermon transcription works
From the recording to the transcript, step by step, and what happens to your audio afterwards.
How accurate is sermon transcription?
What word error rate measures, and why a transcript can be 94% right and still miss Melchizedek.
The theological dictionary
The biblical names, doctrine and Greek and Hebrew words we send with English and Spanish sermons, and 50 of them explained.
Best sermon transcription services
Church-built tools, general apps and human transcribers, compared honestly. We’re one of them, and we say so.
Human vs automatic transcription
What a human transcriber costs, how fast each is, and when paying a person is still the right call.
Spanish and bilingual sermons
Why switching languages mid-sermon trips up transcription, and how to keep both languages intact.
Free sermon transcription
YouTube captions, Whisper and free tiers: what they give you, and what they cost in volunteer hours.
AI for churches
Where these tools help a congregation, the pastoral work they should never touch, and where we draw the line.
A church AI policy template
One page your leadership can adopt: red lines, approved uses, data privacy and who answers for it.
Questions
What pastors ask us first
Something else? Write to hello@khawnan.com and a person answers.
What is sermon transcription?
Turning a preached sermon, from an audio file, a video or a YouTube link, into written text. A good sermon transcript is word for word, with timestamps, so the message can be read, quoted, studied and shared with members who are Deaf or hard of hearing. Typing a 45-minute sermon by hand takes hours; speech recognition does it in minutes.
Will it change or rewrite my sermon?
No. SermonKeep uses speech recognition: it writes down the words it hears, in the order you said them, and never rewrites them. Obvious misrecognitions are fixed and listed so you can undo them; when a word is uncertain it asks you, with the audio ready to play. Anything you skip stays as it was heard.
How is this so much cheaper than a transcription service?
A transcription service pays a person to type every minute you preach, which is why it runs about $1.50 a minute and takes a day or two. SermonKeep uses speech recognition, so a 45-minute sermon is ready the same morning on a flat monthly plan. You still get the final say: unclear words are flagged for you to check.
What can I upload?
An audio file (MP3, M4A, WAV or most other audio formats) up to 500 MB and 3 hours long. If the service is on video, paste its YouTube link instead. Your first sermon is free, up to an hour of audio.
Can we search everything we’ve preached?
Yes. Type a word or phrase and SermonKeep shows every sermon where it was said, at what minute, with the passage highlighted. Put a phrase in quotation marks to find it exactly. It works in English and Spanish, with or without accents. You can also browse by title, passage, series and preacher.
Can the rest of our team use it?
Yes. Invite your staff by email and everyone works from the same sermon library. Both plans include unlimited team members and preachers; they differ only in hours of audio.
Is our audio private? Is it used to train models?
Your sermons are not used to train anyone’s models. Our speech recognition provider, AssemblyAI, has our account opted out of its model-improvement program, and we delete each transcript from AssemblyAI as soon as we have it. Your transcripts belong to your church.
What languages can you transcribe?
English, Spanish, Portuguese, French and German, or let SermonKeep detect the language for you. English and Spanish sermons also get our theological dictionary of biblical names and doctrinal terms.
Can I switch plans or cancel?
Anytime, from Billing in your dashboard. Upgrades apply right away and you only pay the difference for the days left; downgrades wait until the end of the period you already paid for. If you cancel, you keep access until that date and your transcripts stay readable.
Keep every word of this Sunday’s sermon.
Upload the recording or paste a YouTube link. The first sermon is on us.