New feature: Sermon Assistant
Sermon Assistant is an AI-powered tool that helps preachers overcome creative block and makes it easier to create materials to help the congregation better engage with the message. There are two parts to Sermon Assistant.
The Illustrations Generator suggests several short sermon illustrations you can use to explain doctrinal or other concepts. The illustrations aren’t intended simply to be copied and pasted into your sermon but rather to help overcome creative block by stimulating fresh ideas.
The Discussion Questions Generator takes a completed sermon and creates a series of discussion questions based on the sermon that could be used in a church bulletin or small group study. The questions could help ensure the hearers understand the sermon's message and theology, or they could help them apply the sermon to their own situations. Pastors have told us that writing appropriate questions could take them 30 minutes or longer – now, it can be done in just a few seconds!
Sermon Assistant is available to some users today via our early access to Logos Pro subscription. It will be more widely available later in the year. It's available on desktop, web, and iPad.
For more information about the Sermon Assistant, visit our support page.
Comments
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I subscribed earlier today and have started using the sermon assistant. So far the illustrations it provides is too brief to catch people's attention. ALso, when I click, "More Results," the new results are blank.
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I subscribed earlier today and have started using the sermon assistant. So far the illustrations it provides is too brief to catch people's attention. ALso, when I click, "More Results," the new results are blank.
did you read this carefully- The Illustrations Generator suggests several short sermon illustrations you can use to explain doctrinal or other concepts. The illustrations aren’t intended simply to be copied and pasted into your sermon but rather to help overcome creative block by stimulating fresh ideas.
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I subscribed earlier today and have started using the sermon assistant. So far the illustrations it provides is too brief to catch people's attention. ALso, when I click, "More Results," the new results are blank.
I share that view. The AI-created (?) illustrations have only a few sentences and are therefore not to be used for a sermon. It lacks depth.
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I tried the questions generated by the AI twice in a row for the same sermon - and got an error message.
Unfortunately, something went wrong. Please try again later.
The third attempt yields a result, but I am not satisfied: often the questions are closed questions and therefore does not help for discussion, e.g.
Do you find it difficult to humbly accept the sovereignty of God?
Do you find it difficult to share the burden of your life with Jesus and obey him in everything?
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On mobile, one needs to be able to scroll. Currently this seems to be missing.
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The questions generated by Gemini are looking really good. I asked it to give me discussion questions on a Piper sermon and got the following.
Discussion Questions for "A Final Prayer" by John Piper
Focus on the Sermon's Structure:
- How does the structure of the sermon, with its shift from speaking about God to speaking to God, affect the message?
- Why do you think Piper felt the need to explain his decision to pray throughout the sermon?
Content and Theology:
- What are the main points Piper emphasizes about the person and work of Jesus Christ?
- How does Piper define "penal substitution" and why is it important to him?
- What are some of the benefits of salvation that Piper encourages the congregation to embrace?
Reflection and Application:
- How does this sermon challenge listeners to consider their own faith and relationship with God?
- What is the call to action at the end of the sermon?
- How might this sermon be relevant to people who are not familiar with Christian beliefs?
Additional Discussion Prompts:
- Some people might find the focus on sin and condemnation to be off-putting. How would you respond to that perspective?
- Piper mentions his daughter's concerns about the format of the sermon. What are your thoughts on the effectiveness of prayer as the main element of a sermon?
- How can Christians share their faith with others in a way that is both passionate and respectful?
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Sermon Assistant is an AI-powered tool that helps preachers overcome creative block and makes it easier to create materials to help the congregation better engage with the message. There are two parts to Sermon Assistant.
I've been imagining how Logos was going to incorporate AI into the software. I thought the behavior would be like having a local ChatGPT, using the library and responding with that devilish naturalness (literally:). It seems to me that what they offer is very little. And is it by subscription? I did a brief test:
ChatGPT 3.5 Prompt: How does the story of Jesus cleansing the temple challenge our understanding of the nature of God and His presence?
Response from ChatGPT
The story of Jesus cleansing the temple challenges our understanding of the nature of God and His presence in several ways. This incident is recorded in the Gospels, such as in Matthew 21:12-13, Mark 11:15-17, and John 2:13-17. Respuesta de chat gpt
1. **Holiness and Righteous Indignation:**
Jesus' actions in cleansing the temple demonstrate a righteous indignation against practices that were inconsistent with the holiness of God's house. The temple was meant to be a place of worship, prayer, and reverence for God. Jesus, by cleansing it, emphasizes the importance of maintaining the sacredness and purity associated with God's presence.2. **Challenge to Ritualistic Practices:**
The incident challenges a purely ritualistic understanding of God's presence. Jesus critiques practices that reduced worship to mere external rituals without a genuine connection to God. His actions highlight the need for sincerity and a true heart of worship rather than just conforming to external religious customs.3. **Accessible Relationship with God:**
By cleansing the temple, Jesus emphasizes the concept that God's presence is not confined to a physical location or a ritualistic system. Instead, He points towards a more personal and accessible relationship with God. This challenges the notion that God's presence is limited to specific sacred spaces and rituals.4. **Prophetic Role of Jesus:**
Jesus' actions in the temple align with the prophetic tradition in the Old Testament, where prophets often challenged religious practices that had deviated from God's original intentions. In this way, Jesus, as the incarnate Son of God, challenges the status quo and calls for a return to the true essence of worship.5. **Focus on Mercy and Justice:**
Jesus' cleansing of the temple underscores the importance of mercy and justice in God's nature. The sellers and money changers were exploiting worshippers, turning a place of prayer into a marketplace. Jesus' actions emphasize the need for justice, fairness, and compassion in the worship of God.In summary, the story of Jesus cleansing the temple challenges us to rethink our understanding of God's nature by highlighting the importance of genuine worship, the accessibility of God's presence, and the alignment of our practices with principles of justice, mercy, and holiness.
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I've been imagining how Logos was going to incorporate AI into the software. I thought the behavior would be like having a local ChatGPT, using the library and responding with that devilish naturalness (literally:). It seems to me that what they offer is very little. And is it by subscription? I did a brief test:
ChatGPT 3.5 Prompt: How does the story of Jesus cleansing the temple challenge our understanding of the nature of God and His presence?
This example is probably more directly related to Smart Search as opposed to the Sermon Assistant
And, using your query there, it does return some interesting suggestions for articles to explore. And this demonstrates one of the differences I see between the approach Logos is taking and how a chatbot would function. Logos is seeking to identify articles in your resources (or in the case of the All Search, their entire catalogue whether you own the books or not) that discuss the question raised in the search string.
So it isn't trying to come up with its own answer to questions but to point to articles that discuss it
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This example is probably more directly related to Smart Search as opposed to the Sermon Assistant
All I did was to take Mark's question and ask Chatgpt directly and compare the results with what Mark got in his example. It seems to me that the answer I got from Chat has more content than Mark's example. Smart Search or Sermont Assistant, I don't think the term is that important.
Many programs have supposedly integrated AI into their systems, but in reality there is no such integration. You don't get more than what you get by making promts directly to ChatGPT.
In my opinion the most useful thing would be to apply AI to Logos searches, restricted to each Lgos user's libraries (and suggested resources in their store), without having to resort to extensive and complex search constructs using braces, brackets, parentheses, *, /, @, etc.
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I’m afraid I’m missing something
All I did was to take Mark's question and ask Chatgpt directly and compare the results with what Mark got in his example.
I think Mark’s screenshot is showing an AI-generated question from a sermon, not showing the results of asking the question
In my opinion the most useful thing would be to apply AI to Logos searches, restricted to each Lgos user's libraries (and suggested resources in their store), without having to resort to extensive and complex search constructs using braces, brackets, parentheses, *, /, @, etc.
And this is what Logos are trying to do in their All and Book Smart Searches
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Feedback
I copied Galatians 1:6–10 as plain text into a sermon. Then I generated Questions based on Galatians 1:6–10. I copied the questions and asked ChatGPT if there were any duplicates, no duplicates. Then I asked it to arrange the questions semantically. It gave a result resembling an outline as follows:
This could be a very usefull addition to the Sermon Assitant. It not only provides questions but serves as a guide to investigate the Biblical Text according to a defined Study Plan. If this kind of AI features are implemented I will be hooked on a subscription.
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Many programs have supposedly integrated AI into their systems, but in reality there is no such integration. You don't get more than what you get by making prompts directly to ChatGPT.
Integration of AI can't the compared to prompts into a chat bot. AI is much more than the large language model of a chat bot. In the case of Logos search, AI is used to prioritize the results so that the most meaningful results appear first. It is not based on number of matches, frequency in context, etc. as in a normal search but rather is based on the "meaning of the text" as determined by AI.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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I am loving the boost of AI in illustrations. I even find that it can appropriately quote scripture to back a point which is great. Is there a way to "teach" the AI to use my preferred Bible version when doing so?
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Is there a way to "teach" the AI to use my preferred Bible version when doing so?
Not for the user at this point, but it is well worth asking Logos to do so.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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I have a workflow I'm comfortable with using Microsoft Word as my primary sermon editor, so I don't use Sermon Builder. It would be great to be able to access these features outside of the Sermon Builder. Maybe separate Sermon Assistant from Sermon Builder? Or provide access that is not fully integrated into Sermon Builder?
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The change to the way the Sermon Assistant generates questions (in Logos Bible Study 33.0 Beta 3, 33.0.346) has eliminated its usefulness to me. Before, it would generate questions based on the sermon text; now it just gives boilerplate responses to what I type in the idea box.
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The change to the way the Sermon Assistant generates questions (in Logos Bible Study 33.0 Beta 3, 33.0.346) has eliminated its usefulness to me. Before, it would generate questions based on the sermon text; now it just gives boilerplate responses to what I type in the idea box.
Gregory, I hope my clarification in your other thread helps.
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The AI feature is a valuable addition to Logos and serves a useful purpose. One area that could be improved is the text length limitation in the AI summary, which renders the tool less effective for topics with longer texts. Having the option for the AI to summarize only selected text instead of the entire section would greatly enhance its usability.
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When prompted to generate illustrations in Spanish the results come back in English.
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I'm really excited where this tool and the implementation of AI into Logos could go. I'm a youth minister. I love that "youth" is a selectable audience for discussion questions. Is there a way to generate discussion questions solely from a selected bible text (or any resource, really) outside of a sermon document? Even if it's only aggregating my own library's resources of available questions.
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I was brought to this forum when I clicked "Feedback" on the Sermon Assist feature. Here are my thoughts and questions...
- Questions ... so far, this is the best of the three Sermon Assist AI features. If I were using the Sunday sermon as material for a small group study later in the week, this would be a tremendous help. It's amazing how well it analyzes the content of the sermon and generates good questions.
- Illustrations ... I feel these are average at best. I was hoping (1) that just as the AI search analyzes your books and gives results, this feature could utilize the "sermon illustration" books in our library to provide illustrations so that it would function more like the "Quotes" feature and provide actual illustrations from our library. If it fails to find any, then it could generate some ideas. (2) Also, it would be nice to have the option to highlight a section of the sermon or use the entire sermon as the "Questions" feature does and have it suggest illustrations without typing in a prompt.
- Application ... This is a good start, and I hope it is developed further. I noticed that currently, when you check the various applications, it's pretty much the same content other than the location "in the workplace, at home, at church, at school, etc." Again, allow it to analyze the entire sermon like the Questions section, and instead of generating questions, have it generate applications or action points.
Thank you for the work that's been done so far, and I look forward to future enhancements.
Chris H.
0 - Questions ... so far, this is the best of the three Sermon Assist AI features. If I were using the Sunday sermon as material for a small group study later in the week, this would be a tremendous help. It's amazing how well it analyzes the content of the sermon and generates good questions.
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Has the questions feature been disabled? Or is there something wrong with mine? Right now it only shows the "new" outlines feature, and the applications.
I was rather enjoying the questions generated as starters towards turning them into better questions.
Sarcasm is my love language. Obviously I love you. 0 -
On the sermon assistant it would be real good if I could highlight a certain part the text that I want assistance with and get results just from that section if that is what I need at at that time.
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Just a comment on the audience and theme selections options. It would be more obvious which choices I have made were the check mark itself toggled on or off. The background colour behind the selected text is too faint to be stand out to me.
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I agree with you Ian
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Has the questions feature been disabled?
No, it moved out of beta.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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This seems to be the only extant thread in the Forums, started by a Faithlife employee, that is for feedback about the functioning of the new Logos Pro AI features ... it's nominally about Assistant. We need similar threads for each of the new AI features ... Search and Sidebar Summaries, in addition to Sermon Assistant. I posted elsewhere, under Suggestions, that we really need a new CATEGORY for "AI Features".
Anyways ... while doing some testing with Pro this morning, I decided to see if I could get either the Search or the Assistant to correctly identify the three places in Acts where Peter was present to witness the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on three incremental people-groups (2:38 Jews, 8:17 Samaritans, and 10:44 Gentiles ... the completed "use" of the Keys of the Kingdom, btw).
I was totally unsuccessful. I tried several variants of:"When was Peter present in Acts, to see people get baptized with the Holy Spirit?". I used other words such as the Holy Spirit "coming" or "falling", or the use of the Keys (more debated issue of course) ... but none of the hits to any of the searches, or to any of the Assistant requests for Serious Biblical Illustration to Adults, yielded any more than one or two of those instances. I have a large 14k+ library that includes many Theologies and Commentaries which potentially could have addressed this.
PLEASE let me know a specific Smart Search query, or Assistant Query, that yields clear mention of all three of those events in Acts ... and does so within, say, the first 20 "hits" in the Search, or the first 5 tries with Assistant.
If there is no such query, then please IMPROVE the AI so that it correctly identifies those three. Thanks.
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Redeeming the time (Eph.5:16+Col.4:5) ... Win 10, iOS & iPadOS 16
Jim Dean0 -
In the Ai Sermon Assistant, on the iPad I was unable to scroll down.
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Hi Rev. Sharon,
Thank you for your report and sorry for the inconvenience. As you mention, Sermon Assistant has a bug that prevents scrolling on touch-specific devices. We have a fix lined up and it should be working properly once our next stable version of the app is released (v. 34).
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Is there a way to generate discussion questions solely from a selected bible text (or any resource, really) outside of a sermon document? Even if it's only aggregating my own library's resources of available questions.
Not yet. But it's something we're very keen to do.
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