Every Sunday, in churches around the world, a familiar scene plays out. A pastor quotes or paraphrases a Bible passage during a sermon, and the media team quickly searches for the correct scripture to display on the screen. Those few moments can interrupt the flow of worship and distract both the preacher and the congregation. For Nigerian product designer and design engineer Dára Sobaloju, it was a challenge worth solving.
After spending nearly two years refining the concept, Sobaloju developed Pewbeam AI, an intelligent platform that listens to sermons, recognises Bible references in real time and automatically displays the appropriate scripture without manual input. Instead of relying on searches and clicks, the platform allows worship to continue seamlessly while the technology works in the background.
Although the idea appears simple, building it required overcoming significant technical hurdles and one of the biggest challenges was teaching the system to understand context rather than simply matching keywords. Pastors often paraphrase passages or refer to biblical stories without mentioning the exact chapter and verse. Pewbeam AI is designed to interpret those references and identify the intended scripture. When it is not sufficiently confident, it displays nothing instead of risking an incorrect verse, preserving the integrity of the worship experience.
Sobaloju also built the platform with flexibility in mind. Recognising that churches operate with different technology setups, he engineered Pewbeam AI to perform reliably across a wide range of environments. Whether used with advanced multimedia systems or older computers still in active service, the platform combines real-time speech-to-text processing, an offline-first architecture, optional cloud connectivity and Faster Whisper, an optimised implementation of OpenAI's speech recognition technology, to deliver accurate scripture recognition with minimal delay.
The innovation is already attracting strong market interest. According to Sobaloju, thousands of churches have joined Pewbeam AI's waitlist ahead of its wider rollout, demonstrating strong demand for a solution that addresses a long-standing challenge faced by churches. While the company's revenue and turnover have not been publicly disclosed, the growing waitlist points to considerable commercial potential.
The opportunity extends well beyond Nigeria as millions of churches across Africa and other parts of the world use projectors and digital displays during worship. A platform that can accurately recognise sermons and present Bible passages in real time has the potential to become an important tool for churches globally.
Pewbeam AI also arrives as conversational AI continues to reshape digital experiences. Nigeria has approximately 51 million WhatsApp users, representing about 95 percent online penetration. Across Africa, 54 percent of social media users have bought or sold products through social platforms, with WhatsApp leading much of that activity. Increasingly, people expect technology to understand natural language instead of requiring multiple menus and complicated interfaces.
That trend is already visible across leading digital platforms. Users can book holidays through Booking.com using conversations, design graphics in Canva with written instructions, edit videos through InVideo AI and complete increasingly complex tasks with ChatGPT, which is sending significantly more referral traffic to publishers and e-commerce platforms than it did a year earlier.
For Sobaloju, these developments confirm that conversational AI represents the next phase of digital interaction, and he believes Nigeria has an opportunity to play a leading role.
Beyond founding Pewbeam AI, he has built a reputation as one of Nigeria's emerging innovators in AI-powered product design. Combining software engineering, product design and storytelling, his work focuses on solving practical problems through technology. His Figma plugins are already used by more than 50,000 designers worldwide, demonstrating the growing international reach of Nigerian innovation.
His philosophy is straightforward: solve local problems exceptionally well, and the solutions can scale globally. Rather than replicating products developed elsewhere, he believes African innovators should create solutions rooted in local realities and expand from there.
Pewbeam AI embodies that approach. By addressing a genuine need within churches through advanced artificial intelligence, the platform has already attracted thousands of prospective users before its full launch.
If that momentum continues, Pewbeam AI could become one of Nigeria's leading exports in the growing faith technology industry, reinforcing the country's growing reputation as a source of practical, globally relevant AI innovation.
No comments:
Post a Comment