Verse Detection
How Kairos catches every reference, whether it's cited by name or quoted in passing.
Pastors cite scripture in many ways, exact references ("First Corinthians 13:4"), paraphrases, partial quotations, or by simply moving through a chapter, and a single technique misses too many of them. Kairos runs four strategies in parallel and merges them so you don't miss the verse.
The detections panel during a sermon: each card shows the matched verse, the strategy that surfaced it (direct, semantic, quotation, or reading mode), the confidence score, and the transcript snippet that triggered the match. Click to expand.
The four strategies
Direct reference
When the pastor cites a verse by name ("First Corinthians 13:4" or "John 3:16"), Kairos surfaces it immediately. Fuzzy matching catches misheard book names ("Galatian" → "Galatians", "Psalmon" → "Psalms") so transcription noise doesn't sink an obvious cite.
Semantic search
Verses that aren't named, paraphrases, lyrical references, applied teaching, are caught by similarity. When the pastor says "the just shall live by faith" without citing Habakkuk 2:4 directly, Kairos still finds it.
Quotation matching
When the pastor quotes scripture verbatim, even partial sentences. Kairos compares the live transcript against verse text directly. This catches things similarity scoring is too coarse for, like exact phrasings of well-known passages.
Reading mode
When the pastor announces a chapter and starts reading through it ("Let's turn to Romans 8"), reading mode locks the queue to that book and chapter and follows voice navigation forward.
This eliminates false positives from common phrases that sound like references but aren't, while the pastor is in expository mode.
Sermon context tracking
Pastors quote across a sermon's arc. Kairos keeps track of recent books and themes so an ambiguous reference is resolved against the passage you've been in. If you've spent the last ten minutes in Romans 8, a passing reference to "by faith" is more likely Romans 8 than Hebrews 11.
Threshold tuning
The confidence threshold is exposed as a UI control in Settings → Detection. Bumping it up reduces false positives on noisy services; lowering it surfaces more candidates for manual queueing.
Detection runs on your machine
Verse detection runs entirely on your machine, no audio or transcripts leave the app. The only network traffic is what you choose: NDI to your switcher, and optional cloud speech recognition if you've turned it on in Settings.