Coder by Calling

    This has been an extremely busy year working on Scripture App Builder. Chris and his team have been working on the new Progressive Web App (PWA) template for two years. They released the new PWA in SAB 11.2 in March of 2024! However, there were still many missing features. This past summer, they had hoped for 1 or 2 interns to help them with the work. God blessed them with 6 interns to work on implementing these features. One of the interns was Mikayla, our daughter, who is studying Coding: App Development. It was such a joy for Chris to work with her this summer. Thank you for your continuing prayers for our team.

   It’s not enough to translate the Bible; it’s not enough to distribute the Bible. Our desire is to see real Scripture Engagement: people encountering God’s Word in life-changing ways. 
    Scripture App Builder (SAB) is a tool for Bible translators and language workers to provide Scripture in a format that best meets the needs of the community and helps them engage with the Scripture. One of the challenges for new believers is how can they study the Bible and do that in community?
    We have introduced an EXPERIMENTAL feature in SAB 12.0 which allows the person building the app to enable an AI Assistant by providing some predefined tasks that the end user can perform on a whole chapter or selected verses. Here are some example tasks:

• “Give me some Bible study questions”
• “Share some devotional thoughts”
• “Suggest ways to apply this to my life”
• “Explain some key Greek or Hebrew words”
• “Give me an outline of a talk”
• “Write a poem”
• “Show me the main points and structure of this passage”
• “Tell me about the cultural, historical and geographical context”
• “Show how this passage fits into the message of the book”

     When the user selects one of these tasks, the app will connect to a configured AI provider. It tells the AI the role it should play and the format of the responses it is looking for: “You are a helpful Christian assistant who believes in the reliability of the Bible, the importance of following Jesus as Saviour and Lord…” It then asks the AI service a question such as “Look at Mark chapter 8 in the Bible and write six discovery-style study questions which can be used in a participatory Bible study group.” The app writes the streamed response to the screen with a disclaimer at the end stating that the answer was generated by an AI assistant and to use its responses with discernment.
    What do you think? Would you like to try this out yourself? Contact Chris, and he will get you access to a beta of an app.

    This year, Chris, his colleague David, and a team of students have been busy developing a new output format from Scripture App Builder which will expand the reach of Bible apps. This new format is a Progressive Web App (PWA) which is a website that can be used in a web browser or downloaded to a device and used when not connected to the Internet.
    We mentioned a few posts ago that we would have 3 new interns from Liberty University this summer. They were joined by one of the students from Gordon College who worked on it over the 2022-2023 school year. We made a tremendous amount of progress and it is almost ready to be released. We plan to release it early next year as a preview. We know that there will be features that we missed since every feature in SAB (so many!) had to be re-implemented for the web. We will work with end users to prioritize what is left to be done. Thank you for your prayers for our team this past year.

    Some of our staff members in the Language Technology department hosted a webinar recently to share some of the work we are involved with, showcasing some important developments in the Bible translation space. Please watch the recording to learn more about what Chris and his colleagues in Language Technology are doing.

   It’s not enough to translate the Bible; it’s not enough to distribute the Bible. Our desire is to see real Scripture Engagement: people encountering God’s Word in life-changing ways. 
    Scripture App Builder (SAB) is a tool for Bible translators and language workers to provide Scripture in a format that best meets the needs of the community and helps them engage with the Scripture. For many, literacy is challenging or non-existent, so listening to Scripture is very important. Some people in the community primarily watch videos, so the Jesus Film, Gospel Films, or their own films can be streamed from the app.
    For several years, reading plans have been a highly requested feature. SAB 11.1 was released last week and allows the person creating the app to add reading plans. They can select from pre-created plans included in SAB (like Proverbs in 31 days or Mark in 16 days), plans shared by the community (e.g. Biblica is sharing a 365-day plan of verses from Old Testament, New Testament, and Psalms/Proverbs every day), or create their own.
    Another new feature allows the person creating the app to include web radio (internet radio) stations in the app. Some of these stations can be found at https://streamurl.link including stations by long time ministry Trans World Radio.