Sermon Captions, Subtitles and Transcripts

Most people watch church video with the sound off, and some of your congregation cannot hear it at all. Captions solve both problems with one piece of work. Transcripts solve a third — they make years of preaching searchable. This hub covers all three, including what is legally expected of a church and what is simply good practice.

Building a Searchable Sermon Archive From Transcripts

Someone asked for 'that sermon about forgiveness from a couple years ago' and nobody could find it. Your church has years of teaching, and none of it is searchable.

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Subtitles, Captions and Transcripts: The Difference Matters

Someone asked whether the video needs subtitles or captions, and it turned out those two words mean genuinely different things that determine what you actually need to build.

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Caption Styles That Work on a Phone Screen

Your captions look fine on the editing monitor and unreadable on an actual phone. Here's what changes between those two screens, and how to design for the one that matters.

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Why Auto-Captions Mangle Church Words (and How to Fix It)

The caption said 'circumcised heart' as something unprintable, or turned a book of the Bible into a random word. It's not your equipment. It's a known weak spot in how these tools work.

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Captions on a Church Livestream: Live and After

You're already streaming the service. Someone's asked why there's no text on screen, and you're not sure whether your streaming software even supports adding it.

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You Have the Transcript. Now What?

The transcript exists now, sitting in a document nobody's opened since it was generated. Here's what it's actually good for once it's more than a checked box on a to-do list.

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Free Sermon Transcripts: What You Can Get Without Paying

You don't want to pay for transcription if you don't have to. Here's what's actually free, what has hidden limits, and where free tools genuinely fall short.

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How to Transcribe a Sermon (Five Ways, Honestly Compared)

You need a sermon in text — for captions, an archive, or a blog post — and you're trying to figure out the fastest way to get an accurate transcript without paying for something you don't need.

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Closed Captioning for Sermons: Accessibility, Law and Practice

A deaf or hard-of-hearing member has been sitting through your livestream unable to follow it, and you're not sure what the law actually requires. Here's the honest version.

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Sermon Captions: Why Burned-In Beats Everything Else

There are three different ways to put captions on sermon video, and churches usually pick the wrong one for the job. Here's what each does and where it fails.

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