UNREACHED
In Revelation 7, John shares his vision of heaven with members from every tribe, tongue, people and language standing in the throne room before the Lamb.
Yet today there are still over 7,000 unreached people groups around the world.
For the last six years, my family and friends have been on a journey to find, vet and fund the task remaining.
Come journey with us to the ends of the earth as we share the supernatural stories of God at work through the men and women he has called to reach the UNREACHED.
UNREACHED
Holy Tech: When Apologetics Meets A.I
Jake Carlson shares how his AI-powered chatbot is revolutionizing global evangelism by providing biblical answers in 192 languages across 125+ countries. His journey from missionary kid in China to tech innovator demonstrates how cutting-edge technology can be harnessed for the Great Commission, particularly in reaching unreached people groups.
• Built Apologist.ai after years in software development at Oracle and Apple
• Chatbot answers theological questions using content from trusted ministries like GotQuestions.org
• Customizes responses for different worldviews and cultural contexts
• Reaches places traditional missionaries cannot access, including closed countries
• Users feel comfortable asking sensitive questions they wouldn't ask another person
• Developing voice interfaces for illiterate populations and offline capabilities for areas without internet
• Partners with missions organizations to create white-labeled versions that match their branding
• Identifies spiritual openness in conversations to help focus on receptive seekers
• Technology serves as a bridge to human relationships, not a replacement
• Already seeing usage among highly unreached people groups without any targeted advertising
Visit apologist.ai to try the chatbot yourself or alim.apologist.ai for the Muslim-focused version. Reach out to Jake if you're interested in discussing how AI can amplify your ministry's impact among the unreached.
Follow @unreachedpodcast on Instagram for more!
In Revelation 7, john shares his vision of heaven with members from every tribe, tongue, people and language standing in the throne room before the Lamb. Yet today there are still over 7,000 unreached people groups around the world. For the last six years, my family and friends have been on a journey to find, vet and fund the task remaining. Come journey with us to the ends of the earth as we share the supernatural stories of God at work for the men and women he has called to reach the unreached. Hello friends, welcome back to the Unreached Podcast. Dustin Elliott here, your host.
Speaker 1:Today We've got a special episode and it starts with a cool story and you know there's more stories coming. But this story starts out as this guy, jake Carlson, reaches out to me because he heard the podcast and he heard his friend Craig Bradley on the podcast. We did an episode with Craig AO Lab on the Seed Bible and Jake reached out. He goes. Hey, I know Craig loved the podcast. We did an episode with Craig AO Lab on the Seed Bible and Jake reached out. He goes. Hey, I know Craig loved the episode.
Speaker 1:I'm working on something kind of interesting. I just so happen to live in your backyard. I'm in Steiner Ranch, which is just outside of Austin, and he says could we visit? So I said of course we could. So we hopped on Zoom and he shared what he's doing. And, guys, I mean we've been talking about new methods, we've been talking about how to get to the unreached. You want to talk about using the coolest new technology on the planet. That is exactly what Jake is doing. So help me welcome Jake Carlson to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me, of course, of course. So start us out with a little bit about Jake, right? Who are you and what's your background in like professional and faith? How'd you get to know the Lord? To get you started on what you're doing now?
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. I actually grew up as a missionary kid in China and went to a private Christian school there, got really interested in kind of worldview studies, apologetics and through that God put in my heart you know, the heart of evangelism. Watching my parents minister to the people over in China and kind of, coming out of high school and into college, got really in-depth study-wise into apologetics and was looking around at the internet. It kind of was the nascent stages of the internet becoming kind of a communications tool and I noticed online there's a lot of kind of philosophical discourse. But I noticed it was more of a kind of a secular bent and I decided there and then to one day raise up a platform for apologetics online.
Speaker 2:Now, at that moment AI wasn't really a thought in my head. I was just starting my career in software development and you know, to make a long story short, I worked for lots of startups in Austin and abroad. I worked for Oracle and Apple in my career, mostly in software development and then also in product management more recently, and maybe every decade or so, I would remember that domain I bought Apologistcom a long time ago and how I made a promise to myself and God oh, okay, Okay a little seed got planted back there.
Speaker 2:That's right. You know I would kind of start it up and you know it would peter out because I got busy with work or whatever. And it wasn't until 2023 that I had just left my most recent startup right in the middle of the tech layoffs in that time period. It was in that period that, I think, frankly, god was just kind of kicking me in the butt, saying, look like now or never you got to do this. Me in the butt saying look now or never, you got to do this, and so ChatGPT had been taking the world by storm.
Speaker 2:At that point, I saw an obvious opportunity to use the latest bleeding edge technology for the kingdom, and so we started out creating a chat bot, went to a hackathon, unveiled it and part of the tech involved with that is on the human side partnering with ministries that had content to give that chatbot a little bit more context by which to answer from a biblical standpoint.
Speaker 2:You know we unveiled the chatbot in 2023. We decided that it was incredibly important to build up that corpus of biblically-based technology and partner with different ministries, and so we set about from there, creating a corpus management system. And just for the listeners who maybe might not be familiar with the terminology I'm using here. A corpus is basically just a knowledge base. We have partnered with a bunch of different ministries and gotten a ton of content into the corpus, spent the first about year and a half building that up and right now we're kind of pivoting a bit, in the sense that we have enough content in there that the chatbot is really effective at what it does and now we want to pivot a little bit and start partnering with ministries to get it out in the field and I can share some stats a little bit later.
Speaker 1:All right, I'm going to stop you. I'm going to stop you because there's a few things we need to lay out some groundwork here for. Okay, first you see apologists apologetics, just for we don't know if everybody's up to speed on that term and what it means. So take us through. What is it about to be a defender of the faith?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. I view apologetics as evangelism of the mind. You know, god does not ask us to put our intellect at the door and blindly believe right. He asks us to see the works that he has done in the lives of other people, and also the stories in the Bible, and use a fundamental base of that knowledge to go a step further and say, yes, this makes sense. This allows me to believe that, even if there are unanswered questions or things that are beyond my intellect, I believe, based on the trustworthiness of those things, that he is Lord and Savior.
Speaker 1:You're not going to be able to discern it all and understand it all, but it's actually meant to be that way. Okay, so if we have a little bit of a grasp of apologetics, and then you have this real heart for building content, building something that can work when we're sleeping, in theory. And so for folks that don't know a lot about AI and large language models and how that all works, so if you go to like ChatGBT or Grok through X or others, they basically have let them read the Internet, they've trained them to go read kind of everything that's out there, and so you can ask about any topic. But you're going to be pulling from kind of all these different angles and opinions and viewpoints on that topic, and so what you did was you didn't let your LLM, you didn't let yours, read the internet. You restricted it to the Bible and to trusted commentaries and trusted partners and what they've written and said about the Bible and about the faith. Is that fair?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's mostly true, I would caveat it, though. So I'll try to keep this not super technical. But basically, a lot of the large language models that maybe the audience has heard about, including you know ChatGPT, obviously, and you know Grok, like you mentioned, they were trained on a you know kind of unfiltered source on the internet or other sources to generate a natural language processing capability, and what that means is it understands how to interpret language and then turn around and generate a response to questions or prompts. So we actually layer on top of that a corpus of biblically-based content, and what that does is it constrains the responses to that context.
Speaker 2:Several people in the audience may have already used ChatGPT, at least in passing, and a typical use case for that would be hey, I have this huge chunk of text that I don't want to read the whole thing. Can you just summarize it for me? Synthesize, exactly. And so what we're doing is essentially that, except we're providing that content right. So if you ask a question like is Jesus God? Well, we hand the AI hundreds to thousands of documents that were curated from Bible-believing Christians, who wrote it, and synthesizes that content into an answer that's succinct to the user.
Speaker 1:You don't know this, but I shared it with a few people and I said ask it the hardest questions you can think of. It is robust and I have not been able to trip it up, so I went deep. I was like you know, tell me how there are giants after the flood, right, like, explain the heavenly host to me, explain the divine counsel to me. Like I wanted to get in there and see, like could I trip it up? No, no, no, I have not been able to trip it up. It's really something.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. Over the years, right, we've honed it to the point where when we do see an answer that's not 100% optimal, we fix that right, and so it's an iterative process. But I got to say that in the last six months to a year, I don't think I've heard of anybody reporting you know a bad theological concept or anything like that. It's been pretty solid. And again for any of the listeners who are concerned about AI kind of making stuff up right or hallucinations what we do is we ground the AI in that biblical knowledge produced by human beings. So, yes, the AI is generating you know text from its own programming, but the sources of that synthesis are produced by humans inspired by the Holy Spirit to write biblically based content.
Speaker 1:Think of it this way if you go onto a website and you're shopping and you're looking for something and there's a little chat thing that pops up in the bottom right-hand corner of the web page and it says chat with us, right, and then you choose to, or if you're, you know anything you could be doing doing your taxes? Do you need help? Chat with us. Whatever the case is, you've built that and so if I have my website for my church the website we're actually building a new website for the podcast which we're going to feature this on If somebody else has a missions website, or even if you're just a missionary and you've got a small site that you use to stay connected to your supporters back home, etc.
Speaker 1:You could embed the chatbot in there and they could go in there when they're hanging out with your content and go tell me more. Like this missionary just wrote this blog post and this story was about this concept and they talked about Acts 1-8, and I've heard Acts 1-8, but like, what was the geographical, like actual terms between Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and the ends of the earth, and how do I contextualize that? You know in Texas or in the United States? Like you could ask it questions while you're reading that content, right yeah?
Speaker 2:absolutely, and we, you know, we focus in on kind of that biblical knowledge and extra-biblical apologetics content. The strongest use case that we have is really direct evangelism and indirect evangelism, and what I mean by indirect evangelism we're in the world to share the gospel. We're in the world to further the Great Commission and in that capacity we all will bump up against hard questions that our friends or acquaintances, or even you know just chance happenings, will ask us, and we believe that building a very quick resource for people, even Christians, to be able to answer those questions and, you know, as an aid for Bible study and whatnot, is far more efficient than wading through thousands of unvetted Google results or something like that. Right, if you can just get a synthesis of those pre-curated sources, that'll save you tons of time and it'll be more accurate and you can have trust that the sources you're getting them from are all from a curated set.
Speaker 1:Right. So one of the sources is gotquestionsorg right, which I love. I know a lot of people that really appreciate that, and so tell me how'd you get connected with them and how did y'all work that out?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely Mainly through, you know, kind of networking, and there's somebody on our team I don't want to necessarily out them who had a relationship with Shea of GotQuestions connected us, and that's just an example of God's providence in this project. As you mentioned, gotquestions is an amazing ministry kind of a question-and-answer format, so that website is really the ideal kind of content set for us. Right, it's almost purpose-built for exactly what we want, and so GotQuestions has been an amazing partner, and we have many other partners as well. Not only do we ingest their content and use that to help generate questions, but we also produce white-label chatbots, and so if you go to gotquestionschat, that's a version of our chatbot that we provided.
Speaker 2:Now, in that case it's just constricted to the GotQuestions Ministries corpus, right, it's not anybody else's, because they have a pretty comprehensive corpus. But any other ministry that wants to create a chatbot that blends in with their color palette and has all their messaging can do so. And not only that, but they can selectively turn on or off the different sources that we have. So you'll have people say like I really I trust GotQuestions. I want to have my own chatbot, upload some of my own stuff, maybe some sermons or whatever. And then I just want to turn on the faucet for the GotQuestions corpus, but maybe not some of this other stuff. That's totally doable, oh cool.
Speaker 1:I can hear some of the older guard out there turning the volume down right now and maybe going for a walk and they're like I don't know about this. I don't know about this stuff. Chatbots this sounds too young and maybe it won't work and can I trust it is? If you're trusting Google, you're getting Google with a huge layer of trusted, approved, synthesized results that your team has already gone through and said like these are the guys that are doing it the best, these are the books and commentaries and sites and such that we trust. And so if you go in and you ask a question here, your results are going to be cleaner, faster, better.
Speaker 1:The point you made when you're just sitting with someone having a conversation about the gospel and you're talking through a concept and you know, you can think of a point in the Bible where you would like to go pull that verse or that story from. But, man, I don't remember was that in Matthew or Mark or was that in John, because John's different. I can't remember which one it was in. You can just ask Pull it out, just open the app and ask and it's going to pop. It's going to be there for you, just like that, and not just the scripture itself but some commentary on it as well, to kind of help you see how others have thought through it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, to kind of help. You see how others have thought through it.
Speaker 1:Yeah absolutely Okay. So this is the Unreached Podcast. Now we've talked through this evangelistic chatbot and what it can do, but right now we've only talked about or thought about it really in English, and it doesn't only work in English, does it it? Actually? You've got a translator built into it and I think you said 192 languages right now, that's right?
Speaker 1:Yep, how incredible is that? So somebody could ask a question in their heart language and it's going to figure out what it's asking, find the answer, translate it back to them in real time. Is that how it works?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. As I stated earlier, we're here on earth to fulfill the Great Commission and, yes, you know, the AI is an amazing tool for, you know, sermon prep and you know, helping Christians here in the West understand biblical passages and all that good stuff. But the way we differentiate ourselves is we try to focus on evangelism, and obviously there's a big world out there. I grew up as a missionary kid, as I stated, so my heart is leaning in that direction and to date, our chatbot has been used in over 125 different countries, spread out across 64 languages and counting right. So, as you mentioned, we support 192 languages and if you count that up, that's double or quadruple what most of the commercial AIs can offer. And we do that through real-time translation and that allows us to convey those biblically-based answers in just about any language you can think of.
Speaker 1:That's incredible. Okay, and so the country where you're getting the most activity right now, or the part of the world, is really in Southeast Asia, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've had amazing usage in Indonesia and Singapore in particular, and then just kind of random other countries that we're not advertising in per se, and then just kind of random other countries that we're not advertising in per se, but just word of mouth has spread. South Africa is a big one for us as well. Indonesia is an interesting case, in particular because that's the largest you know Islamic country in the world by population. You know we've built specific chatbots that minister to that worldview and we're still building others for other worldviews as well. And so we go in and not only can you kind of customize the look and feel, but you can customize how it's ministering, right. So how are the responses related to the particular person's use case? And how we got there honestly is kind of an interesting story as well.
Speaker 2:We started out by building a chatbot and my assumption at that point was like, hey, let's build one chatbot to rule them all right, like this entity that could just respond perfectly to anybody. And I was talking to a missionary friend of my father's who he knew in college, currently serving in Bangladesh to the Muslim population there, and he was offering his feedback and said like hey, yeah, you know, your chatbot's really great. It gives me, you know, biblical support for the answers and everything like that. But here's the thing, jake, muslims aren't going to find that very compelling. What you need to do is contextualize the gospel, and that was like an aha moment for me. It's like, of course, you know, how could I have, you know, not seen this? You can't just have the same message for every audience. It's not going to work. You have to contextualize it.
Speaker 2:Paul at Mars Hill, for example. And so that set us on a course of building variants of the chatbot that minister to specific worldviews. So, in the case of Islam, we partnered with several ministries that were specifically geared toward Muslim ministry, got their content and put it into the chatbot, but also partnered with some folks who were more familiar with ministering to the Muslim population than I. Was. Growing up in China, eastern China specifically I just didn't encounter a lot of Muslim populations, it's just not my wheelhouse. So what we do is we partner with ministries who have specific focus areas or specific people group and we come alongside them and help them build a customized chatbot that will minister to that particular population.
Speaker 1:So they've got that bot then on their site and the people that are going to their site are primarily in that area, correct? Yes, but what if I'm running a global missions organization and there's people in 50, 60 different countries and accessing my site? Am I going to have the general bot or will it know where that person's coming in from and you can then supply that bot in that?
Speaker 2:area. Yeah, so we allow ministries to create as many different variants as they have different use cases. Okay, so you could easily you know, in the sense of like a media-to-movement kind of situation, where maybe the ingestion point is like social media or something like that you could advertise one of your variants that specifically ministers to, say, indonesia, like I mentioned before, and have that funnel go to, specifically, a chatbot that's been designed to minister to that people group. I was on a panel at South by Southwest, the Sunday service, and right after I got off of the stage, someone approached me and said like hey, I have a ministry, or I'm involved with a ministry that specifically targets Islamic women coming out of abusive relationships in Turkey. That's a very hyper-focused specialization.
Speaker 1:I'm not gonna say it out loud, but I think I know which one you're talking about.
Speaker 2:Okay, but anyway, the point is that you can hyper-focus the intent of these chatbots to whatever level of context you want. We have a general Muslim-serving chatbot, but you could extend that to any geographic region, any subset of the population, anything like that.
Speaker 1:Crazy, cool. So some companies will have different sites for different parts of the world, and then you could gear it to that part of the world and what's that look like in partnering with you. So if I'm listening to this, uh like, we know a lot of the heads of the biggest missions orgs in the in the world uh are are listening. Um, what, what would you say to them? Reach out, check it out. Let me run a demo for you. This is how it could work. You could test it here, you could test it there. We can do different iterations, is it like? How do they partner with you?
Speaker 2:How do we do it. So the first step is just to reach out and we'll set up a demo and during that demo we'll kind of, you know, tell you a lot of this. You know, we'll kind of reiterate some of the things that we've said here about kind of the use cases and so forth. Sometimes we'll build a demo ahead of time. In fact, I find the most effective demos is, you know. For example, we've got questions, right, like I built a chat, a white label chat bot for them with their corpus, didn't release it to the world, right, and nobody else could access it, because we always get permission for any of the content that we're using. But I rolled into that meeting saying like, hey, here's your chatbot, it's already ingested your entire content.
Speaker 1:Open this up and try it.
Speaker 2:See how it works and the jaws just drop right Because it's like, wow, because we've built a platform where that kind of thing is fairly easy to do ahead of time, right? And so I don't always know the ministry well enough to know what content to ingest ahead of time, but usually it'll just happen that, you know, we'll have a uh, an initial call. We'll, you know, understand their use case, but then, very quickly afterwards, we'll spin up a white label chat bot with their, with their content, with their branding. We can even, you know, match the fonts on your site. We can do make it really detailed and um, so that, so that everyone understands, when we meet with them, that this can really fit in and augment their digital strategy. It's not like something out here, right, it's something that you can plug and play into your ministry. What?
Speaker 1:are they going to get? What are they going to get from it? What data are they going to get that they can use? Are they going to see who's on, how many people are on, what questions are being asked, et cetera?
Speaker 2:How many people are on, what questions are being asked, et cetera. Yeah, right now all the chatbot usage is anonymous, but we do collect, you know, information about language and country and everything like that. We are going to have like an authenticated version in not too long but for that evangelism use case, we're not expecting that. A lot of people say in a Muslim country are going to create an account, right, because that could you know any way to trace back to the people in countries where there might even be laws or at least heavy social stigma aren't going to want to have an account. So most of it's anonymized, but the ministries involved will be able to see the prompts and responses that are going back and demographic details about the users, Sure, and if they're, on their site, then they have a way to contact them there.
Speaker 1:So if something happens in that conversation with the chatbot somebody I don't want to say fully goes all in, but maybe they get close or maybe they do then they know they can reach out to the organization, they can get connected to somebody. You can set up next steps from there.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah, the organization who you know. When we build a chatbot for an organization, they're in control of how much information to divulge about themselves. You know, in some sensitive areas it might not be advisable exactly to trace it back to you know an organization in the sense that it might kind of compromise their operations in that country, and so they're in complete control of that. They can send the user back to a website if they click to learn more, but they don't have to right. You can also just kind of remove that and just have it more of like an anonymous kind of ministry.
Speaker 1:You know God's in time and on time all the time right. Nothing surprises him. This isn't something he didn't see coming. But I just wonder what it's like to see the internet take off and people engaging with the Bible digitally, and now this new incredible iteration with AI coming in and people having actual conversations and we know this is happening culturally in the world. Man, this is so cool. I mean, somebody's going to be able to truly have access to the gospel and get their questions answered and, you know, depending on which side or which place they're doing it through, you know they can probably get connected to somebody and figure out what's next for them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. And one key thing that I neglected to mention earlier is that the handoff from an AI to a human being is exceptionally important for us, right? So I don't want to get too much into the theology of technology and how God uses and all that good stuff, but I think most Christians would agree that it's through the work of the Holy Spirit and that very often is through a relationship between a human being to another human being. So the AI can certainly kind of point people in the right direction and even answer really good. You know hard-fought questions and I believe that God can work using the Holy Spirit through any kind of external simulation, right? So, for example, if someone's heart is stirred by the act of someone giving to the poor, that's the Holy Spirit working. If someone gets a question answered that was a kind of a hang-up intellectually for them via AI, that can still be the Holy Spirit working.
Speaker 2:But we do offer a way in our chatbots for that handoff to a human being to occur. So what we do is for every white-label chatbot you can add a call to action of any sort beneath the question, right? So if you look at a partner like—we're also a partner with allaboutgodcom, for example—and they have, at the end of every one of their webpages, some call to action, some buttons that say like hey, yes, I've indicated my interest in learning more about Jesus of the Gospel, or hey, I want to learn more, something like that, right? And so what they've done is they've built in that same call to action at the end of every prompt. So it's almost as if you know, you ask the chatbot a question, it gives you a dynamically generated essay, essentially about that topic, just like the content on that website. And then, just like their website, at the bottom it says like hey, you know, click here to get in touch with a human being. Let's talk a little bit more about our relationship with Jesus.
Speaker 1:I wonder if this, as you gather more data, if this will start to inform the task remaining in the Great Commission community. Like there's a lot of questions coming from this people group in this area who's there Is nobody there yet. Like that might be a place we need to go get somebody to.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and we've actually just recently we've cross-referenced kind of our usage against the Joshua Project's data and we found that, you know, in several of the highly unreached people groups we actually have thousands of prompts going on that you know. Again, not advertising there, don't have any idea how it happened. Just we put it on the internet and through both our first party chatbots and our ministry partners, we're reaching people who aren't being reached right now. You know there are lots of great missionaries in the field, but there are too few, right, I think.
Speaker 1:More taxi cab drivers in Vegas than missionaries. In the 1040 window you got all the stats on that.
Speaker 2:That's why we're here right. So one thing that you hit on a little bit earlier that I'd want to touch on as well is yes, a human relationship is definitely key for outreach, but sometimes that's not an option. Sometimes it's the middle of the night, Sometimes it's in a place where there's a ratio of one missionary to a million people right. Sometimes there are situations, again in closed countries, where you can't openly seek right. Seekers are lost and have no connection to anyone who would even be able to share the gospel to them. But most people have a phone right or at least a big portion of people, especially in the developing world and they have access to this technology that can answer these questions with a high degree of accuracy, 24-7, in any location that has an internet connection. Another use case that we're exploring is situations where there's not internet, For example, many remote regions, especially in Africa and other places in the world, where we could embed the AI onto a device that could then be brought into that country and used without any connectivity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that's incredible. So that makes me think about, like DeVar right, and the audio Bibles, and a lot of people in the world who are not able to get internet access so they can't go online and read, but they have this, and then, of course, there's the whole conversation around who can read and who can't read, and what can you do that?
Speaker 2:in audio? Absolutely, yeah, that's a really good point. So we're exploring voice agents as well. But I was just talking to a really large Christian evangelism organization the other day and they're kind of exploring having, you know, not just voice but avatars kind of you know, so there's actually looks like a human being talking to you. But I think voice is going to be a huge area of expansion for us, both because of cases where maybe the user is actually illiterate, but also because it's just a lot more convenient.
Speaker 1:That's fascinating. We don't think about how few people can actually read. We don't think about how few people don't have internet access that's readily available and reliable and good enough that you would actually sit there and engage with it and use it, and good enough that you would actually sit there and engage with it and use it. But, man, when you start to address those last kind of issues, and you oh my gosh, yeah, clint's over here just smiling and nodding like whoa, this is so cool, this is so cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and there are plenty of. You know. Voice technologies is obviously not new. The problem really is latency right, like how do you synthesize and generate the voice? And in the last couple of years that technology has grown in leaps and bounds. So now you can. You know, you've probably seen the OpenAI demos and some other companies where somebody's literally just talking to an AI and the response is very quick. I mean, if you get that in the hands of a seeker where they're just having a conversation, they don't even have to type, they can just start talking back and forth with an AI and get those biblically-based responses, that to me, is really powerful.
Speaker 1:Goodness, gracious man, what a call on your life, and I love how the seed was planted years ago I mean growing up in the field, obviously, but then grabbing that URL and just kind of waiting waiting on God's prompt to say like now's the time that the tech is ready and you are ready, like you've done enough in this field, that you're an expert, you know how to do it. One thing on your website that I noticed was you mentioned the hackathons earlier. But what in the world is a hackathon for those of us that don't hackathon?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So a hackathon is an event where a bunch of people get together and, in a short time span, try to develop some kind of technology, output Right, so some kind of product or some kind of outcome, and the key there is is that it's in a time boxed. Lot of innovation tends to happen where people are focused. You have teams working together usually teams, at least Some people go it alone, but the best outcomes are usually when various different professionals get together and try to develop something, brainstorm and bring a product to fruition in a short period of time. Got it Late.
Speaker 2:Last year we participated in two separate hackathons, one put on by a company called Glue and another with a international digital missions organization called Indigitous. Leading up to that first hackathon I think it was in October of last year God really laid it on our heart that we really needed to develop these worldview-specific chatbots, and so we took that as a clear sign that we ought to develop a chatbot specifically targeting the Muslim population, just because, obviously, Islam is one of the major religions. In fact, some of the research recently has indicated that it's going to overtake the Christian population in about a decade, mostly through birth decade, mostly through birth rate, not through conversion, they're making more babies than we are Exactly, but in any case, that's an obvious kind of demographic for us to focus on.
Speaker 2:And so we partnered with a bunch of ministries to develop a chatbot for that particular hackathon, to kind of demonstrate the capabilities of targeting a particular worldview. Went to that hackathon. It was an amazing experience. We brought a team of about five or six people and at the hackathon the nature of these hackathons is that some people just show up without a team and are just interested in getting involved with a project that's already going on. So we also kind of not only brought a team but we garnered a couple other kind, you know kind of members of the team at the hackathon who were, you know, saw what we were doing and were like, hey, I want to be involved in that. So the experience was really great and lots of connections made, lots of networking.
Speaker 2:So now you have a global team, absolutely Right, yeah, yeah. So through these hackathon events, one of the individuals on our team actually resides in Malaysia and I think that's so important. Like, yeah, you know, honestly, I'm a white Protestant here in the US, but I havea heart for evangelism, and to not have that international focus is a really big miss for me personally, right, no doubt.
Speaker 1:Hey, the mission field's become the mission force. And your buddy, craig Bradley, right I mean, he said that. He said that he's got some folks that come from other religious backgrounds who have now become Christ followers through the work they're doing developing the seed Bible. And that's not the sole reason that he brought them in. He brought them in because they were highly technically skilled and at a cost that a non nonprofit could afford. But the result is, when you get into this work and when you're in the Bible a lot, it is the living word and some things can and will change Absolutely.
Speaker 2:And that global perspective is really important for us. I grew up in an environment where we did focus on kind of the classical Western Christian mindset, but contextualizing that for peoples across the globe is just so important, and so we believe that, through partnering with global missions, organizations that have people on the ground over there that have the sensibilities of how to reach the people that they're ministering to, that is really the most powerful combination. We bring our technology, our expertise in conversational AI, and combine that with the expertise of the people serving across the globe and you have just a really powerful combination. Who's that sound like?
Speaker 1:That sounds like TMAI I mean the same concept Like we've got these training materials. We've kind of got some you know experience in how to run a church, when you plant a church, things like that. But we're not coming in here saying we know how to do everything and you have to do it our way. We're coming in saying help us understand who you are and your culture and what's important and what's relevant to you, and here's some things that could be useful and would you like to consider working together and could some of these be helpful? And that's just this very humble approach that you're sharing as well, which is very important to me and I know a lot of our listeners to hear that, because you're clearly a very, very smart guy, but you're not walking around the world going. I know more than you You're going. Hey, I just kind of have access to some cool stuff that could be supplemental and helpful for you and I'm here to help.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've been surprised by how open people are with AI, and that's another aspect we didn't explore too much. But while that relational aspect with a human being is important, it's also true that people open up to AI more than they do to human beings a lot of the time.
Speaker 1:That's a fascinating concept.
Speaker 2:And so not only do you have the access, the language, but also there's this thing where I might go to chat GPT, and since it's not a human being on the other side of that, potentially judging me, I'll say— you might ask it. The really hard stuff you're dealing with Exactly Like I'm not shy about that, and so when we're reviewing our chat logs and seeing what people are using it for and what people are asking, it's all anonymous, so we don't know who it is. But you'd be surprised, Like you know, we have stories of you know people in Egypt, for example, talking about sexuality, right, and that's a really hot topic. If you're a Muslim in the middle of Egypt, right, talking about sexuality and stuff like that, and you want some both guidance and comfort in your feelings, like that's a really heavy topic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I could get you killed talking to the wrong person about that Exactly right, like, who are you going to trust with that information, right. But we see people opening up to you know, in a conversational AI context. And then another example would be you know, we have chat logs of people who are experiencing abuse, you know, and asking questions about you know, how do they handle it?
Speaker 2:Like, what do they do? And you know the person's either going to go to another human being, which sometimes they're reluctant to do, or they're going to, you know, search, google or something like that and get a mishmash of advice from various sources, or they can come to a biblically-based conversational AI and they'll get a Christian perspective on their issue.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's amazing. Yeah, that's a wrinkle, I hadn't considered. Hey guys, as you're listening to this, if you want to test out the technology for yourself, Jake, what site could they go to or what app could they download and give this a go?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the easiest one would be apologistai. So that's going to be our generic kind of chatbot. It has knowledge about all the different worldviews. If you want to check out the Muslim serving one specifically, we have a URL for that as well. It's alimapologistai. That's A-L-I-M dot A-P-O-L-O-G-I-S-T dot A-I for the Muslim Serving Chatbot, and that one's pretty interesting as well. It services a lot of the Muslim-speaking countries and has specific training to minister to the Muslim peoples. There you go.
Speaker 1:There you go. So, apologistai, type it in, check it out, go, ask us some hard questions. So, given the kind of current state you're in, you've got the translation stuff going. You're considering bringing voice and even avatars in where there's kind of a conversation that's being had. We're considering where the internet is not, although there are others that are working on getting the internet everywhere and that's incredible. You've got all these different avenues, all these different kind of channels. What are you most excited about?
Speaker 2:Well, that's a great question.
Speaker 2:There are so many different avenues for us to explore right now, but in reality we're just so excited to partner with missions organizations spreading the gospel across the globe to come up with innovative solutions using our AI technology.
Speaker 2:For example, we're starting a study about evaluating different AI models for their ability to align with the Christian worldview, with a Christian worldview. Another project that we're kind of embarking on is using AI to analyze conversations that are happening in real time to determine the spiritual openness of the seeker right. So we're working on that in partnership with a couple ministries and if you're a ministry out there that wants to explore conversational AI, maybe you already have a media to movement program but you want to augment it. You know we also run against a lot of missions organizations who are just inundated with inflow of seekers that and they need some kind of automation to kind of narrow down to the people in that funnel that are most earnestly seeking. We're exploring ideas like that. So if you're a missions organization that is interested in that kind of automation using AI, definitely reach out. But there's just so many ways we can, so many different directions we can take this right now. We're really excited for what the future holds in fulfilling the Great Commission.
Speaker 1:Yeah, same here, same here. I'm excited as well. And the last thing, as we kind of wrap it up here, I would just challenge our community to be open to new methods. Consider this an opportunity to add another arrow into your quiver. That can again, I just think that it can work while you're sleeping and it can help people get clarity on hard topics and it can help people get to a place where they're ready for a conversation and ready to engage and ready to be more helpful and partner. So definitely consider it.
Speaker 1:And then you know to the funders that are out there that listen to this podcast as well it's not cheap to develop this kind of as well. It's not cheap to develop this kind of technology and it's not cheap to run this kind of technology. I mean offline. We were talking about just the cost. What you need to be able to do that real-time translation is really it's expensive and it's an ongoing expense. Jake has a huge heart for making this available and it's an ongoing expense. Jake has a huge heart for making this available and not letting cost be a hurdle that missions and nonprofits can't jump so they won't implement it, and so that falls to those of us that are in the funder side of things and that are able to partner in that capacity.
Speaker 1:So just pray with me If there's a place for you to participate in this project with Jake. I know they're raising right now. They have a runway ahead of them, but they have a lot of work to do and I know Brittany and I are going to pray about how we can be helpful for you and get it out to our community as well, because this is another. You know and you got to us through Seed Bible and Craig, but this is another one like that. This is a new method that I would love to see fully. You know unleashed, and you know, man, the possibilities are endless, as we know. So, hey, we always ask the guests, as you know, if you've heard the podcast, to pray for the listeners. So would you close us in?
Speaker 2:a prayer, absolutely, father. God, we just thank you so much for each and every listener right now and for their heart, for the unreached otherwise they wouldn't be here and, lord, I just pray that we would continually seek ways to glorify you and fulfill the Great Commission, whether that's through technology or just ministering to our neighbors where we're at. You know, we always want to seek ways where we can meet people where they are, and sometimes that's through technology and that's kind of our focus. But, lord, there's just so many ways that we can glorify you through our actions and words. In Jesus' name, I pray, amen.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to Unreached. Our sincere desire is that what you've heard today will cause you to see the mission of God differently and your role in it more clearly. If this adds value for you and we hope it does would you please rate and review the podcast wherever you listen. Also, share with your family, your friends, your church, your life group, small group, d group, wherever you do life, and if you want to connect with us, find us on Instagram at unreachedpodcast, or email us at unreachedpodcast at gmailcom.
