#87 - From Text to Voice: How Truth for Life is Using Voice Cloning

Featuring Sarah Sharp and Mike Costlow, Truth for LifeRecorded live at the Digital Ministry Conference 2025.When Truth For Life wanted to turn Alistair Begg’s two-year devotional series into an audio experience, they faced a challenge: time constraints made it impossible for Alistair to voice hundreds of entries himself. In this Digital Ministry Conference session, Mike and Sarah share how Truth For Life tackled this problem by responsibly and creatively adopting voice-cloning technology.Rather than starting with a tech trend, they began with a ministry need—and brought in Theotech founder Chris Lim to help build a custom voice model of Alistair. You’ll hear how they navigated data collection, audio model training, and ethical considerations like consent, transparency, and ownership. You’ll also learn how they chose to run the model on-premises (saving costs and boosting control), built editor-friendly workflows, and thoughtfully introduced the AI-generated voice to their audience.Key Highlights for Ministry Marketers:AI Grounded in Ministry Need: This wasn’t tech for tech’s sake—it was solving a real bottleneck in delivering Alistair Begg’s devotional content.Ethics and Transparency: From securing Alistair’s consent to publicly disclosing that the content is AI-generated, Truth For Life modeled best practices.On-premise vs Cloud: Cost-effective and scalable, their on-prem deployment avoided per-word pricing models.Quality Control: Audio engineers used AI-assisted editing to fine-tune the voice output, ensuring the tone, cadence, and inflection matched listener expectations.User Feedback & Reach: Since launch, the devotional audio has been streamed over 960,000 times in 190+ countries—including Antarctica.Explore the power of responsible AI adoption in ministry and hear how Truth For Life brought the voice of Alistair Begg to hundreds of thousands—without compromising quality or trust.Resources Mentioned in the EpisodeTruth For Life – Official ministry siteTruth For Life Podcast on Appletfl.org/dmc — Listen to sample audio from the voice modelTheotechChris Lim on LinkedIn