Lagos, Nigeria — In a move that bridges the gap between ancient scripture and cutting-edge technology, software developer Dára Sobaloju has successfully launched Pewbeam, an AI agent designed to revolutionize how Bible verses are displayed during church services.
The tool, which Sobaloju began building “in public” on social media in August 2025, addresses a long-standing challenge for church media teams: the struggle to keep up with a fast-moving preacher.
Seamless Real-Time Presentation
Traditionally, media operators must manually search for and display verses as a pastor mentions them. Pewbeam automates this entire process. Using advanced speech recognition and natural language processing, the AI listens to the sermon and automatically displays the relevant Bible verses on screens or teleprompters in real time.
What sets Pewbeam apart is its ability to recognize context. It doesn’t just wait for a formal citation (e.g., “John 3:16”); it can identify and display the correct scripture even when the pastor paraphrases or quotes from memory.
Key Features of Pewbeam
- Contextual Recognition: Automatically detects scripture from paraphrases and indirect quotes.
- Offline Functionality: In a significant engineering milestone, Sobaloju announced that the tool now works completely offline, making it accessible to churches in areas with unreliable internet coverage.
- Open-Core Model: The project follows an “Open-Core” philosophy, allowing tech-savvy users to self-host and “Bring Your Own Key” (BYOK) for AI models, while offering a subscription service for those who prefer a “plug-and-play” experience.
- Live Dashboard: Features a “Live Sermon Dashboard” with real-time transcription, session stats, and verse detection history.
From Concept to Global Beta
The journey from a viral tweet to a functional product took only three months. Pewbeam has already seen high-profile deployment, recently being utilized during Apostle Joshua Selman’s teaching at the Koinonia School of Ministry programme in the UK.
“This is a huge step toward what was only a dream for me about three months ago,” Sobaloju shared, noting the “many sleepless nights” required to achieve offline capability and deep product integration.
By removing the friction between the spoken word and the visual display, Pewbeam allows congregations to remain more engaged with the message without the distraction of delayed or missing verses.
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