THE AI ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
AI is all the rage right now, and many AI tools advertise a 95% accuracy rate. Sounds great, right? Here's what 95% accuracy means in practice:
A 45-minute sermon has roughly 7,000 words. At 95% accuracy, one out of every 20 words is wrong. That’s approximately 350 wrong words in a single transcript. That’s a wrong-word error about every 8 seconds.
Yikes.
Even worse, that count only includes wrong words.
It doesn't include incorrect punctuation, messy formatting, mangled Scripture references, or theological terms the software can't recognize.
Plus, it has no way of knowing when it misspelled the name of your church, your pastor, or anyone else you mentioned from the pulpit.
The accuracy ratings AI tools use have nothing to do with any of those things.
Here's a real example:
Pastor said: In Psalm 20:7, it says, “Some trust in chariots…”
AI transcript: In psalm 27 it says some trust in cherries us…
Wrong psalm. Wrong verse. Wrong words. Wrong capitalization. Wrong punctuation.
In ONE sentence.
A 45-minute sermon has around 700 sentences.
Cleaning all that up takes HOURS. Not minutes.
We know.
Because churches have asked us to do it.
We don't accept that type of work anymore because it takes twice as long to fix a messy AI transcript than it does to start from scratch.