Hi guys, I built an open-source alternative to @pewbeam_ai in one week. github.com/openbezal/rhema Started coding during a Sunday church service. By the following Sunday, we were using it live during our church service. Wild. Here's what Rhema does: it listens to your pastor's sermon in real-time, detects Bible verse references as they're mentioned, and displays them on screen instantly. No manual clicking, no dedicated slide operator needed. The tech stack: - Tauri 2.0 with a Rust backend handling all the heavy lifting: audio capture, transcription pipeline, verse detection logic, and system tray integration - Local AI embeddings using Qwen3-0.6B so everything runs on-device with zero cloud dependency. Your sermons never leave your machine - Real-time audio transcription paired with semantic search against a full Bible verse database The Rust backend was a deliberate choice. We needed low latency audio processing and efficient memory usage for running an embedding model locally, and Rust delivers on both. Is it perfect? Probably not. But the core functionality works and we're already using it in a real church environment This is where you come in. Rhema is fully open source and we need contributors to help take it to the next level. Whether it's improving the verse detection accuracy, adding multi-language support, building a better overlay UI, adding support for more Bible translations, or optimizing the transcription pipeline, there's real work to be done and real impact to be made. If you're a Rust developer, a frontend engineer, an ML enthusiast, or just someone who loves building tools for the church, come build with us. Star the repo. Fork it. Open a PR. Let's make this the go-to open-source solution for live Bible verse display in churches worldwide. github.com/openbezal/rhema
