While working on this project, I had to transcribe and edit hundreds of audio files — 145 at first, later almost 400 — using a paid AI service. Each file cost real money. The whole job took hours, sometimes even overnight. If you’ve ever started a long task where each step costs money, you know the worry. Three problems can happen, and I ran into all three before I learned how to prepare for them. ...
In the post on search I gave you the clean version: type a word, get every place it was said, tap to jump to that moment. That’s true now. But I made it sound smooth, and for a while it wasn’t. The search had a bug that wore me down — and tracking it down taught me one of the more useful lessons in this series. The symptom was maddening. You’d search a word, see a result, tap “play from here” — and the audio would start playing twenty minutes before the word you searched for. The search found the right thing. It just sent you to the wrong place in the recording. Sometimes by seconds, sometimes by twenty whole minutes. ...
A pile of audio is a black box. You know the teacher said something about a certain verse. You can almost hear it. But it’s somewhere inside hundreds of hours of recordings, in one lecture out of hundreds, at a point you can’t remember. Without a way to search, those recordings are write-only: you can keep adding to them, but you can never really get anything back out. The bigger the collection grows, the more it buries. ...
My wife listens to a Bible teacher every morning. After I built her an app to make that easier (the first post in this series), she asked for one more thing. It turned out to be the hardest part of the project. Could we also read his teachings, she said, not just hear them? Reading helps her study. She wanted the words on a screen. “Sure,” I thought. “I’ll just turn the audio into text.” How hard could it be? In 2026, turning speech into text is mostly a solved problem. ...