Recording Your First Sermon

Your first recording takes less than a minute to start. Here's everything you need to know to capture a great sermon.

Before you record

• Make sure your phone is charged or plugged in — long sermons can drain battery quickly.
• Enable microphone permission if prompted. Berea needs this to transcribe live audio.
• A Wi-Fi connection gives you the best transcription quality, but Berea works offline too using Apple's on-device speech recognition.

Starting a recording

1. 1Open Berea and tap the record button (microphone icon) on the home screen.
2. 2A new recording sheet will appear. You can optionally add a title, speaker name, church, and scripture passage — or skip this and add it after.
3. 3Tap Start Recording. The live transcript will begin appearing within a few seconds.
4. 4Place your phone on the seat beside you, face-up, with the microphone pointed toward the speaker.

During the recording

The transcript scrolls automatically as words are recognized. You'll see each word appear with a slight delay — typically under 300 milliseconds. You can tap any word to jump to that moment in the audio, even while recording is still live.

If you need to step away, tap the pause button. Recording resumes immediately when you unpause. The transcript is saved automatically throughout.

After you stop recording

When the service ends, tap Stop. Berea will save the recording and immediately begin post-processing:

• Deepgram upgrade — Berea sends the audio to Deepgram's batch API, which produces a higher-accuracy transcript with word-level timestamps.
• transcript polishing — The transcript is cleaned up for grammar, punctuation, and speaker names using your Faith Profile for context.
• Study materials — Once the transcript is ready, tap the Summary, Prayers, or Quizzes tab to generate study content on demand.

This background processing takes a few minutes. You can navigate away — it will complete whether or not the app is open.