I had the inspiration to create Romansten.org after hearing from leadership and missionaries at Chapel Street Baptist Church in Landis, NC. They were excited to share that they supported missionaries sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a vast number of countries around the world, but they wanted to expand their reach.
As one might imagine, a continuing challenge for expanding their reach was the language barrier, as well as finding individuals willing and able to travel abroad for extended periods. As someone whose job has always been to maximize efficiency with minimal resources, I sought to find a solution with modern technology.
In the Bible, the book of Romans chapter ten says that believers should “teach all nations.” To me, this meant making the message available in every conceivable language, and thankfully, Google has a minimally-priced translation API that supports hundreds of languages, but this is a text-based translation. Since most sermons are shared in audio/video format, I had to also integrate Google’s speech-to-text API since it is regarded widely as accurate, and priced negligibly, at least in early stages.
When discussing the process with members of the church, someone asked me “well what if they can’t read?” Approximately 21% of Americans are considered functionally illiterate, with some regions in the world having much higher rates. Thankfully, AWS has a text to speech API called Polly.
With these all in place, the biggest task left was to make this process as simple as possible. With that in mind, I had to make an upload portal with minimal moving parts so there wouldn’t be a technological literacy barrier as well. I decided to use CloudConvert’s video/audio conversion API as the starting point so that nobody using the tool would have to worry about audio sample rates, or file types other than video. If someone can navigate to a webpage, select a video file from their phone or PC and click a button, they could use the online tool, and have a brand new page generated with their own sermons available to be read or heard in a wide variety of languages.
To see this in action, or my SQL project, click HERE