How to Upload Sermons and Use the AI Processing Pipeline

The Upload Area is a drop zone that also opens a file picker when you click it. You can drop multiple audio files at once and the page will queue every one of them under "Sermons in This Batch". Each accepted file is checked against the supported formats (MP3, WAV, M4A, OGG, WEBM) and the 500 MB-per-file size limit before it appears in the list.

Once a file is queued, you can keep dropping more files and editing earlier rows. The list is your batch, and pressing the big upload button at the bottom uploads every pending item in sequence.

When you drop an MP3, Sermon Mind reads the ID3 tag and pulls the recording date if one is present. For M4A or MP4 files, it reads the standard creation atoms instead. If the file does not have an embedded date, the upload falls back to the file system "last modified" date, and if that is missing too, it defaults to today.

This is one of the easiest things to miss because it happens silently. If the auto-detected date is wrong, just edit it on the card before uploading — your edits stick even while AI is running in the background later.

Every sermon row in the batch is a full sermon card. You can set the title (defaults to the file name), confirm the date, assign a pastor from the dropdown (the list comes from members with the Pastor role), and add as many tags as you want before the file is processed. Tags you set here become the starting point for the AI — it will add more, but yours are preserved.

If only one pastor exists for the church, that pastor is selected automatically for every file in the batch. Adding new pastors happens on the Users page, not on the Upload page.

When you press the upload button, each file goes through three states: Uploading (transferring to storage), Processing (running through the AI pipeline), and Completed. The Processing label updates with the current pipeline step — "queued for transcription", "transcribing", "summarizing", and so on — and the page polls the pipeline every few seconds so you do not have to refresh.

During Processing, you can still edit the title, date, pastor, and tags on the card. When the pipeline finishes, the AI-generated summary, full summary, transcript, scripture references, and additional topic tags appear automatically. If the pipeline fails, the card shows an error and a Retry button.

The "Upload allowance" card at the top of the page reflects your current plan or trial. Free trial accounts have a hard cap of 3 sermons during the 14-day window — uploads above that are blocked. Paid plans allow overage uploads, billed as line items on the next Stripe invoice.

Before a batch starts, the page warns you about any sermon that will push past the included amount and asks for confirmation. There is no surprise billing — every overage is shown in the confirmation dialog with the estimated charge.