The Privacy Question

Sermons are not just public speeches. They contain personal stories, prayer requests, pastoral illustrations drawn from real situations, and counseling references that people shared in confidence. When you introduce software that listens to a sermon, you need to know exactly where that audio goes.

With most transcription tools, the answer is “to somebody’s cloud server.” That means a third party receives, processes, and potentially stores your pastor’s words. For a church, that is a serious concern.

Vies takes a different approach.

Everything Runs on Your Computer

Vies performs all speech recognition directly on the church computer. The audio from your microphone is processed right there on the machine sitting at your projection desk. Nothing is streamed to an external server. Nothing is uploaded. Nothing leaves the building.

This is not a “we promise we delete it later” situation. The audio literally never touches a network connection. You can unplug the ethernet cable, turn off the Wi-Fi, and Vies works exactly the same. The one exception is Network Sharing, which uses your local network (not the internet) to share verses between devices. This stays within your building — no data leaves your network. An internet connection is not required for the core transcription and verse detection features.

The entire pipeline — from microphone input to detected Bible verse on your projection screen — happens inside one application on one computer.

No Recordings Are Stored

Vies processes audio through a rolling buffer. It listens, transcribes, checks for verse references, and moves on. It does not save audio files. It does not record sermons. It does not write WAV files or MP3s to your hard drive.

Vies does save a text transcript of each session to a file in your Documents folder when you stop listening. This is a plain text file containing only the words that were spoken — no audio, no metadata, no timestamps beyond the filename. You can find these in Documents/ViesScribe/ and delete them at any time.

The live transcript in the app resets each session. Saved transcript files contain only plain text — no audio recordings, no verse detection logs, no usage data.

If your church wants to record sermons, that remains a separate, intentional decision with your own recording setup. Vies does not add to it and does not interfere with it.

No Account Required

There is no signup process. No email address to enter. No cloud account to create. No license key to activate.

You download Vies, install it, and run it. That is the entire onboarding process. There is no login screen, no “create your workspace” step, and no trial that expires into a paywall.

This also means there is no user profile tied to your church, your pastor, or your congregation. Vies does not know who you are and does not need to.

What About Cloud AI Mode?

Vies includes an optional Cloud AI mode that enhances verse detection using Google’s Gemini AI. Here is exactly what happens when you enable it:

  • Your microphone audio is still processed locally by the on-device speech engine. No audio is sent over the internet.
  • The transcript text (the words, not the audio) is sent to Gemini to help identify Bible verse references that the local matcher might miss.
  • You provide your own Gemini API key (BYOK). Vies does not have a server that handles your data — the request goes directly from your machine to Google’s API.

Cloud AI mode is strictly opt-in. Local on-device processing is the default, and it remains the default unless you change it yourself. If your church’s policy prohibits sending any data to external services, leave Vies on the default setting. The on-device engine handles sermon content well on its own.

Zero Telemetry

Vies does not phone home. It does not send usage statistics. It does not track which verses were detected, how long your services run, or how often you use the app. There is no analytics framework embedded in the software.

There are no “anonymous usage metrics” either. No telemetry toggle buried in an advanced settings menu. The app does not communicate with any server unless you explicitly enable Cloud mode. Network Sharing communicates only with other Vies instances on your local network — no internet traffic, no external servers.

Your sermon content, your service patterns, and your church’s data stay on your machine. Period.

Get Started

If privacy matters to your church — and it should — Vies is built for exactly that concern. On-device processing, no recordings, no accounts, no tracking.

Download Vies and try it at your next service.