An iPhone app that listens to Pali chanting at a Theravada Buddhist temple and shows the English meaning line by line, live, like lyrics.
For: Buddhist temple-goers of any age who chant regularly and want to understand the words, and the merit behind them. Accuracy is treated as sacred: it only uses trusted, published translations and never makes one up.
What it does: Live chant-follow highlights where the monks are, shows how confident it is, and has a one-tap “wrong” flag. A morning quote and mood check-in offer a real Dhammapada verse or protective chant. Monastery recordings come with synced lyrics, and you can practice by heart, ask a grounded “what does this chant mean?” chat that cites its sources, and share quote cards.
How it's built: Native SwiftUI (Swift 6, iOS 17, SwiftData). Whisper handles speech recognition, with Groq Whisper large-v3 as a backup, and a fuzzy Pali sound-alike matcher runs over a curated 43-chant pack from Thanissaro Bhikkhu's free Chanting Guide. The chat answers only from that pack and the Dhammapada, and a quote checker verifies it. I built it with AI agents for build, evals and design: 197 automated tests plus held-out audio evals, with 0 wrong lines on in-pack chants.
Next: Testing in a real temple and review by monastics. Not on the App Store.