Empowering communities to internalize, translate, and celebrate God's Word in their mother tongue.
Shema is a community within Youth With A Mission (YWAM) dedicated to ending Bible poverty. We focus on Oral Bible Translation (OBT), recognizing that many language groups prefer oral communication over written text.
Our mission is to help communities:
- Internalize Scripture through storytelling and memory.
- Translate the Bible into natural, spoken forms of their language.
- Celebrate the message of God in the language that speaks to their hearts.
We build open-source software to support the OBT workflow: web apps for drafting, transcription, and verification; Flutter mobile apps for field work; and AI/ML tools for acoustic tokenization, model training, and agent-assisted analysis.
Languages & Tools:
| Repo | Description | Maintained |
|---|---|---|
transcription |
Nativox: AI-powered transcription for low-resource languages with In-Context Learning | |
translation-helper |
AI-powered voice translation with Google Gemini, speech recognition, and Bible translation tools | ✅ |
obt-mentor-companion |
AI-powered mentorship tracking for OBT facilitators | ✅ |
obtlabchat |
AI platform with GPT/Gemini, chat, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and image generation | |
meaning-map |
Biblical semantic analysis | |
mm_poc_v2 |
Modern Biblical Meaning Maps with React + FastAPI + PostgreSQL | ✅ |
mm_poc |
Biblical Meaning Maps (BMM) server for BHSA passage data | |
beads |
Oral Bible translation tooling | ✅ |
oral-bridge-hindi |
Oral Bridge resources for Hindi | ✅ |
LAC |
Translation Tripod project | |
tripod-studio-app |
Flutter app for Tripod Studio: validators generate and review oral Scripture from Meaning Maps | ✅ |
translation-app |
Flutter app for audio segmentation and translation | |
agents |
AI agents with Google ADK for biblical text analysis and meaning map generation | |
acoustemes-demo |
Acoustic tokenization demo: HTML viewer for acoustemes JSON segments | ✅ |
model-training |
Bible Audio Acoustic Tokenization Pipeline (XLSR-53 + K-Means + BPE) | ✅ |
models-experiments |
Kosrae MMS model training with Gloe workflow orchestration | |
draft-generation-example |
Draft generation workflows for oral Bible translation | |
rfcs |
Request for comments and documentation tracking | |
reference-agents-md |
Reference agent files for IDE-based agents (Cursor, Windsurf) |
Built with ❤️ by the Shema Engineering Team
