Last updated October 7, 2026
This service listens to a sermon while it is being preached and puts a translation on the phones of people in the room. Listening to a church service is a serious thing to do, so this page says exactly what happens to the audio and what is kept.
The sermon is never recorded. The transcript is not stored unless your church turns that on.
By default, speech is turned into text, translated, sent to the listeners, and then it is gone. Nothing is written to a database, and nobody, including CFMSite, can go back and read what was said in your service. This is enforced in the code itself, not by policy. The one exception is a church that asks us to keep a written record of its services, described in section 5.
When a service starts, the phone or laptop at the front sends audio from its microphone to CFMSite, which passes it straight to a speech recognition service that converts it to text. The text is translated and sent to every listener who has joined that room. For some languages the translation is also read aloud by a synthetic voice so listeners can use earbuds instead of reading.
All of that happens in a few seconds and none of it is saved. Audio is not written to disk at any point.
These companies process the audio or text only to perform the task. Several are based in the United States, so data may be processed there.
Nothing is collected about you. You do not make an account, you do not give a name, an email or a phone number, and there is no tracking on the listener page: no cookies, no analytics. Choosing a language is the only thing the service knows about you, and only while you are connected. Like any website, the connection passes through Cloudflare, which sees your device’s IP address in order to deliver the page; we do not keep it. Close the page and there is no record you were there.
A pastor can upload a sermon before a service so the translation follows prepared wording and gets names and scripture references right. Unlike the live audio, an uploaded sermon is stored, because it has to be available when the service starts. It is kept with that church’s room, used only to improve that church’s translations, and is replaced when a new one is uploaded. Ask and it will be deleted.
Transcripts are off for every church by default. A church can ask us to keep a written record of its services, for example so a native speaker can check the quality of the translation afterwards. Only then do we store, for that church alone, the text of what the speech recognition heard and the translation that went out, with the time of each line. We do not record audio even then. The church can ask us to turn this off, or to delete what was kept, at any time.
Only what is needed to run and bill the service:
No audio. No record of individual listeners. No transcripts unless your church asked for them.
The translations are generated by AI. Machine translation of live preaching is not perfect. It can mishear words, and it can render a phrase in a way a native speaker would not choose. It should be treated as help for following along, not as an authoritative record of what was preached, and it is not a substitute for a human interpreter where one is required.
Churches using this service should let people know a live microphone is carrying the sermon to a translation service. The placard CFMSite provides for the back of the room says so.
Live Translation is operated by Ryan Ybarra, sole proprietor, trading as CFMSite. The wider privacy policy covering websites and accounts is at cfmsite.com/privacy-policy.