Transcribe a bilingual church service in te reo and English.
A New Zealand church service held in te reo Māori and English, 90 to 120 minutes long, comes back as text in 3 to 4 minutes. The first 20 minutes are free, and the $6 pack of 500 minutes then holds four two-hour services.
How a bilingual service comes back
Both languages stay in the text, in the order they were spoken.
Two languages, one timeline
The service is detected on its main language, and the moves between te reo and English are handled rather than forced into one. A mihi in te reo, a reading in English and a karakia to close all land where they happened, with a timestamp beside each.
An honest note on te reo
Te reo Māori is transcribed with lower accuracy than English, and it is weakest on names, whakapapa and quoted scripture. Call it a fast first draft, plan one review pass by a fluent member of the congregation before the text goes into a newsletter or onto the website.
Replay link or desk recording
Services streamed to YouTube can be pasted as a link, replay and all. A Facebook stream is downloaded first and then uploaded, and a recording from the sound desk or a phone on the pulpit goes into upload page directly.
Sermon notes for the week
The brief gives the sermon's thesis and takeaways, chapters split the welcome, readings, sermon and pānui, and the questions the service answers can seed a home group's discussion. Hymns and waiata are not transcribed; the spoken parts are.
Why bilingual services get skipped
Most tools hear one language and garble the other.
✗ One-language tools, one-language results
A service that moves between te reo and English confuses tools that expect a single language set in advance.
- Te reo passages turned into English nonsense
- A language setting that must be picked first
- Free tiers that stop before the sermon
- Volunteers typing late on Sunday night
- Captions that drift from the replay
- No record of past services to search
✓ Both languages, one document
The service comes back once, in order, with each part easy to find.
- Language detected from the audio
- English and te reo switches kept
- Around 4 minutes a service
- Waiata and hymns left out
- Chapters for each part
- SRT and VTT that match the replay
Sample
A bilingual service, as it comes back.
This sample is illustrative and was written for this page; it is not from any real church's service. Labels mark where in the service a line falls, not who spoke it.
Export
One transcript. Five clean formats.
Every pack exports all five — no format is held back for a higher tier.
Plain text
De-ummed paragraphs. Ready to paste.
SRT captions
Timed to the speech. Every video editor reads this.
WebVTT
HTML5 player + YouTube uploads.
Show notes
Formatted with chapters and pull-quotes.
Machine-readable
Timestamped text for your own tools.
Pricing
Honest pricing, no surprises.
A pack from $6 (500 minutes) opens the full transcript. After that, no subscription and no auto-renew — every tier is a one-time minute pack, and credits never expire. Buy once, use the minutes whenever you need them.
Casual pack
$6/500 min
8 hours of audio — $0.72 an hour. One-time — credits never expire.
- 500 minutes of audio
- All export formats
- Unlimited AI chat per transcript
- Executive summary & key quote
Best value
$12/2,000 min
33 hours of audio — $0.36 an hour. Credits never expire.
- 2,000 minutes of audio
- Priority queue
- All export formats
- Unlimited AI chat per transcript
Bulk pack
$24/5,000 min
83 hours of audio — $0.29 an hour. Credits never expire.
- 5,000 minutes of audio
- Priority queue
- API access for batch pipelines
- All export formats
FAQ
Bilingual church services, the common questions.
How long until the service text is ready?
About 4 minutes for two hours, near 2 minutes per audio hour. A 90-minute service usually comes back in around 3, before the congregation has finished the cup of tea after church.
What does it cost for a parish that records every Sunday?
Fifty-two services of 100 minutes come to 5,200 minutes, a little over the $24 pack of 5,000 minutes, so a year needs that pack plus a $6 pack for the last two Sundays. For a single month, four two-hour services use 480 minutes of the $6 pack of 500 minutes.
How large can our service recording be?
A service file can be as long as 10 hours or as large as 5 GB. Before the first pack, uploads reach 2 GB, which a sound desk MP3 never comes near: two hours at 192 kbps is about 173 MB (192 kbps times 7,200 seconds). A long, high-resolution video might pass 2 GB, and saving its audio track solves that.
Does it work if the service is mostly English with te reo prayers?
Yes. Te reo Māori is one of 99 languages detected automatically, and the recording is detected on its main language, so a mostly English service is read as English and the te reo passages are still transcribed. Those passages deserve the closest check.
What comes back, and is the recording kept private?
Bilingual services export to TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT and JSON. Recordings are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training, and a service and its text can be deleted at any time.
Can we put the sermon text on our website?
Yes, after the review pass. Export DOCX, tidy it, and post it with the replay; the SRT or VTT file can go on the video as captions at the same time.
Related
More from church life in New Zealand
Send Sunday's service. Te reo and English, both kept.
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