Follow along

Follow along puts what is on the screen onto the congregation’s own phones, in the language each person picks, and can put the sermon beside it as live captions. It was built for the deaf and hard-of-hearing members in the hall, and it turns out to help anyone who wants the verse in their own hands.

It comes with BibleLook Plus. Turn it on in Settings → Follow along.

The link

Your church has one link, and it does not change from week to week. Put its QR code where the congregation can see it, and anyone who scans it once can save it and open it every Sunday.

The page shows nothing between services. Nobody has to be told when to open it.

New link replaces the code. Every phone reading the old one stops, and the QR code on the wall has to be replaced too, so this is for a link that has got somewhere it should not have.

What a reader sees

The top of the page is whatever is on the screen: the passage in the translation they choose, or the words of the song that is up. Under it runs the sermon, if captions are on.

• A passage stays in place while the preacher talks about it, so somebody reading can look back at it.
• A song takes the whole page, and the captions pause. The words on the screen are better than a transcript of singing.
• With nothing on the screen, the page gives itself over to the sermon.
• On the Appearance tab the reader picks their own language, text size and theme, and turns captions on or off. The page remembers it all.

Add ?tv to the link and the two panes sit side by side, for a television or a tablet on a stand: nobody wants to hold a phone for forty minutes.

Captions

Captions are written by a speech service on the internet. While they are on, this computer sends the microphone’s sound to it and gets the sermon back as text. They do not need the listening switch on the Bible page or its model, only the same microphone. Turn them on from Settings → Follow along, or from the button beside the listening switch on the Bible page.

The sermon is written as it is spoken, a sentence to a line. Words appear within a second, faintly at first, because the last few may still change while the service hears what follows them. A few seconds later they turn solid, and a solid word never changes again, so nothing a reader has already read moves under them.

Captions in a second language. Pick one under Also translate into and the page offers the sermon in that language too. A phone set to that language shows the translation, and everyone else reads the sermon as spoken. The translation runs a few seconds behind and repeats any mistake in the captions.

Caption hours. Plus gives each church four hours of captions a month, and Settings → Follow along shows how many are used. When they run out, captions stop until the first of the next month and the rest of the page carries on.

BibleLook records nothing. The feed holds the last ten minutes so that somebody arriving late can read back, and deletes everything a quarter of an hour after the computer disconnects. We keep no recording and no transcript. The sound does leave the building while captions are on, which is worth telling the preacher.

Getting captions worth reading

Take the audio from the mixing desk, not from a microphone in the room. This makes more difference than anything else on this page. A room microphone hears the building; a desk feed hears the preacher.

Then:

• Set the sermon language in Settings → Follow along, under the captions switch, beside the microphone. By default it follows the translation on the screen, which goes wrong the moment an English passage is read to a Ukrainian congregation. Captions are written in this language.
• Plug the desk feed straight in. BibleLook turns off the echo cancellation and noise suppression a computer applies to a video call, which clip the consonants a recogniser needs. Leave any processing to the desk.
• Expect rare names to come out wrong. The less common names of people and places in the Bible are where it struggles most. The sense of a sentence survives it.
• Read it yourself once, from the back of the hall, before you tell anyone it is there.

What captions are not

Many Deaf people’s first language is sign language, and reading a second language is not the same as hearing in a first. Captions serve hard-of-hearing and late-deafened members best. They do not replace an interpreter, and nobody should be told they do.

For the band

Turn on Band link in Settings → Follow along and your church gets a second link, with its own QR code. Send it to the musicians, and do not put it on the wall. It shows everything the congregation’s link does, plus an Order tab: the whole order of the service open on the computer with blocks as headings, where the service is now and what comes next, so the band can see the next song coming. Every song shows the key it is played in (its key, moved by its transpose) and its arrangement, when it has one.

• The order follows the operator. Blank the screen between songs and it stays where it was; show something that is not in the order and it says so, and keeps its place.
• The open service shows while it is today’s, before the first thing goes live, so the band can read ahead while they tune up. A service for another day never shows.
• It carries titles only, never the words of a song or a passage.
• New link under the band link stops the old one without touching the congregation’s, for when someone leaves the band.

Who can read it

Anyone with the link, up to five hundred at once. There is no sign-in, which is the point: a visitor scans a code and reads.

That also means anyone the link reaches can read along, so put it where the congregation is rather than where the internet is.