New feature: Sermon Assistant

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.

Shefelton, Marc Edward said:

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.

On mobile, one needs to be able to scroll. Currently this seems to be missing. 

Mark Barnes (Logos) said:

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.

Graham Criddle said:

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.

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.

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?

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?

When prompted to generate illustrations in Spanish the results come back in English. 

I was brought to this forum when I clicked "Feedback" on the Sermon Assist feature.  Here are my thoughts and questions...

1. 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. 
   
   
2. 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. 
3. 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.

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.

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.