If your church is looking for a sermon transcription service, the options can feel overwhelming at first. A quick search turns up dozens of services at wildly different price points, promising wildly different things.
Most churches make this decision by comparing prices and moving on. That approach works fine if you're transcribing a board meeting or a staff call. It doesn't work well for sermon content, which has specific accuracy requirements that most general transcription services aren't equipped to meet.
The questions below will help you cut through the noise and find a service that will actually deliver what your church needs. And fair warning: some of these questions will immediately eliminate most of the services you're considering.
1. Do they have experience transcribing sermon content specifically?
General transcription and sermon transcription are not the same thing. A transcriptionist who is excellent at transcribing business meetings or legal proceedings may struggle with theological content, biblical references, Hebrew and Greek terms, and the names of scholars, theologians, and historical figures that come up regularly in sermon content.
Ask specifically whether the service has experience with sermons and whether their transcriptionists are familiar with biblical content. A service that can't answer that question confidently is probably not the right fit for your church.
2. Are the transcriptionists human, or is it AI?
This question is more important than it used to be, because many services that present themselves as professional transcription companies are now using AI tools to generate transcripts and doing minimal human review afterward.
Ask directly if every transcript produced by a human transcriptionist, or does the process involve AI at any stage? If AI is involved, ask what the human review process looks like and who is responsible for catching errors. If the answer is vague, assume the answer is that errors don't reliably get caught.
3. What is their accuracy guarantee?
Any reputable transcription service should be willing to stand behind the accuracy of their work in writing. Ask what their accuracy guarantee is and what happens if a transcript doesn't meet that standard.
A service that won't commit to a specific accuracy level or that offers a vague promise of "high quality" without defining what that means is telling you something important. SermonScribe guarantees 99.9% accuracy and offers a full refund if that standard isn't met.
4. Do they verify Bible references?
This is the question that separates services that understand sermon content from services that don't.
When a pastor says "turn to Psalm 20:3," a transcriptionist who simply types what they hear will probably put Psalm 23. A service that verifies Bible references will look up every passage to confirm the book, chapter, and verse numbers are correct.
Ask explicitly if their transcriptionists look up Bible references to verify accuracy. If the answer is no, or if the question seems to catch them off guard, the transcripts your church receives will contain unverified Scripture references that may not be correct.
5. How do they handle proper names, Hebrew and Greek terms, and quoted sources?
A sermon that references Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Septuagint, the Council of Nicaea, or the Hebrew word hesed requires a transcriptionist who knows how to find and verify the correct spelling of those terms. A transcriptionist who guesses will produce a transcript full of misspelled names and terms that reflect poorly on your church's content.
Ask how the service handles unfamiliar proper names and theological terms. A good answer involves research, reference materials, and a willingness to flag anything they can't verify rather than guess at it.
6. Will the transcript be ready to publish, or will it need editing?
This is a question many churches never think to ask, and the answer significantly affects the real cost of the service.
Some transcription services deliver a raw transcript that captures what was said but requires significant editing before it's suitable for sharing. Grammar needs correcting. Filler words need removing. Sentences need reshaping for the page. If your church staff has to spend hours editing every transcript before it can go live, the low price you paid for the transcription starts to look less attractive.
Ask whether the transcript will be ready to post on your church website immediately upon delivery, or whether editing will be required. A professional service should be able to give you a clear answer.
7. Can they match your church's branding?
A transcript that goes on your church website is a published document that represents your ministry. A plain, unformatted text file is technically a transcript, but it's not the same as a professionally designed document with your church logo, brand colors, and formatting preferences.
Ask whether the service offers custom transcript design and what that looks like in practice. Ask to see a sample. A service that delivers beautifully designed transcripts treats your church's content as a finished product rather than a deliverable they're moving off their desk.
8. How does the file delivery process work?
The logistics of how your church gets its sermon audio to the transcription service and how the finished transcripts come back to you matter more than most people think when they're evaluating a service for the first time.
Ask how the process works from start to finish. Does your church have to remember to send files every week? Does someone on staff have to manage the handoff? Or does the service handle the file retrieval on your behalf?
SermonScribe visits each weekly client's church website every Monday morning, downloads the new sermon audio, and gets to work without any action required from the pastor or their staff. The transcript arrives. That's the entire process from the church's perspective.
9. What are the payment terms?
Most transcription services require payment per order, which means your church is managing individual transactions every time a sermon is transcribed. For a church that wants weekly transcription, that's fifty or more separate transactions per year.
Ask whether the service offers monthly invoicing and what the terms look like. Monthly invoicing consolidates all of your church's transcription into a single invoice at the end of the month, which is significantly easier to manage from a bookkeeping standpoint and easier to present to a finance committee as a recurring ministry expense.
10. What happens if you're not satisfied?
Before your church commits to any transcription service, know what your options are if the work doesn't meet your expectations.
Ask what the revision policy is, what the refund policy is, and what the process looks like if a transcript comes back with a lot of errors. A service that is confident in its work will have clear, straightforward answers to these questions. A service that hedges or makes the process sound complicated is telling you something about how they handle problems when they arise.
One More Thing Worth Knowing
The best way to evaluate a transcription service is to see their work before you commit. Ask for a sample transcript, ideally one from sermon content similar to what your church produces. A service that does excellent work will be glad to show you. A service that deflects or offers only generic samples may not be confident in what a sample of their actual work would reveal.
SermonScribe makes this easy. You can view real sample transcripts on our website before you ever schedule a call or spend a dollar.
Ready to Ask the Right Questions?
Schedule a free consultation call with Ginger and get answers to every question on this list as it applies to your church. We'd love to show you what professional sermon transcription looks like.
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SermonScribe has provided accurate, beautifully designed sermon transcripts for pastors and ministry leaders since 2008. Learn more at SermonScribe.com.
