Ollama

I had just added six commentary volumes to my Bible search. I asked it a question about the fruit in the garden of Eden. The answer came back with sermons and Bible verses. Not one of the six new books was among the sources. The books were in the database. The search just did not pick them. The Need: A Source You Added Must Be Able to Appear If a new source never shows up, you cannot tell whether it is broken or simply ranked low. You only see the answer, and the answer looks fine. It is easy to think “the system works” and move on. ...

I have a lot of Bible material that I cannot search together. Sermon recordings turned into text. A commentary that I scanned page by page. A few Bible translations. Each one has its own search, or no search at all. When I wonder “what did the Bible and the preachers say about this?”, I open four things and read. So I built one box where I type a question, and it answers using all of them, with a number after every claim that points to the exact source. ...

I like the idea of running my own AI. No bill, no data leaving my house. So when I needed to clean up a long transcript, I tried the local way first. The result changed my mind about when “free and local” is worth it. The Need: Speech-to-Text Gets Names Wrong Whisper turns a Korean sermon into text very well, but it makes a certain kind of mistake. It hears Bible words as ordinary words. A town name becomes a nonsense word. A book of the Bible becomes a different book. And one example I like: the Korean word for Psalms, sipyeon (시편), sounds almost like “ten pyeon” (10편). Whisper wrote “10” where the speaker said “Psalms”. ...

Not every recording I transcribe is a Bible teaching or a home video. Some of it is confidential — calls from a counseling hotline, where people are talking about the hardest thing in their life. That kind of audio can’t go anywhere near a paid cloud API. Not because of cost. Because it isn’t mine to send anywhere. That ruled out Whisper’s API and ElevenLabs — the two services I’d already used and paid for — for this particular kind of file. I needed something that would run entirely on my own PC, touch nothing outside it, and cost nothing per file. My PC has no GPU. Whatever I built had to live with that too. ...