In 2022, BJU developed space on the second floor of the Mack Building for use by SermonAudio. Funded by a donor, the space includes offices for most of SermonAudio’s staff of 10 as well as four BJU students interning there this semester.
SermonAudio works with the BJU Computer Science Department to provide experiential learning internship opportunities for their students. BJU’s students obtain valuable experience in their field of study while SermonAudio gains needed manpower and talent to advance their mission of preserving and propagating sound teaching.
The BJU student interns do development work for the SermonAudio app and website as well as work with cutting edge hardware such as the H100 GPU supercomputer and advanced storage. They work under the oversight of Stephen Schaub, who serves on BJU’s faculty and is the SermonAudio chief technology officer.
Schaub says, “The SermonAudio internship is a rare opportunity for BJU Computer Science students to use their skills directly to further the preaching of the Gospel around the world. It really is very special.”
Steven Lee, founder of SermonAudio, emphasizes the importance of missional alignment when hiring at any level. “We have a very strong mission,” he says. “We don’t want to hire just anyone. They must line up with our mission, so we have to plant ourselves beside a stream of likeminded people who can supply talent. That’s what BJU is for us.”
In addition to being paid for their work with SermonAudio, the student interns also receive academic credit for their experiential learning. “It’s really an ideal situation,” says Lee. “The students share their time and talents with us. They have easy access to our facilities since they’re right on campus, they’re learning valuable skills that will help them in their future careers, and they’re working on projects that the Lord is using to directly impact the Kingdom.”
One of SermonAudio’s biggest projects, The Vault, was launched when they moved into the Mack Building. The Vault is a long-term project to store every one of the 2.5 million sermons on SermonAudio on servers that are independent of cloud platforms. More information about The Vault is available at vault.sermonaudio.com.
In addition to The Vault, SermonAudio is also working on:
- The Audiobook Initiative: a multi-year project using artificial intelligence (AI) to convert into audiobook format every Christian classic and many classic sermons. With permission, SermonAudio uses cloned human voice recordings to “read” the text of the book or sermon. The audiobooks will be available for free on sermonaudio.com.
- Global Sermons Project: sermons preached in English are being translated and “re-preached” into dozens of languages with the click of a button, also using AI.
- An AI-powered automatic transcript feature for videos and sermons was announced in October and is rolling out platform-wide. The auto-generated transcripts are clean, accurate and searchable.
