Shepherd is an iOS app I recently launched. It's a Bible app with a built-in LLM chat. You can ask Shepherd any question about the Bible. Shepherd will help you understand scripture and explore concepts you're exploring in your faith. With a $4.99/month subscription, you can save your chats and have unlimited messages with Shepherd.

If you ask any Christian who uses an app to explore the Bible, they most likely will recommend you the YouVersion app. The app has the most translations, lots of Bible study plans, and everyday you're given a short exploration of a specific verse of the day, which is powered by their iOS widget.

There's a lot of great features in the YouVersion app, but there's not an LLM. What does an LLM unlock? A tailored app experience. And in the case of studying the Bible, it could unlock a much more streamlined and focused exploration of your faith. Which anybody who's serious about their faith would want.

This week I launched a widget feature for Shepherd.

How does it work? It actually asks an AI, currently gpt-4o, for a "Bible verse that is powerful on it's own", or something like that. This request happens when you load your phone, and a day later it will refresh to a new one. This means that your verse of the day is different than your friend's verse of the day. Some might argue it's a better social experience to have a consistent verse of the day for all users to explore together. Having a unique UX opens up other possibilities for social sharing - ie. "what was your verse today?" The Shepherd widget is essentially a clone of the YouVersion widget, except unique to the user.

Currently the Shepherd verse of the day is just random, and when clicked it only opens the app, but I will change that next week. When you click the YouVersion widget, it opens to an image of the verse of the day and if you click through a few other images, you watch a video of a person you've never seen before describing something about the verse of the day. Then there are a few short text-based explorations of the verse of the day. It's a good experience and helps you learn, but it's not tailored to you.

The reason I churn from the YouVersion app experience is because the exploration isn't always what I need and doesn't have an impact on me. I don't feel a connection to it in my heart. Christianity is about relationship with God, who wants to know your heart. It's not about obedience, but relationship. It's like in the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15, where the younger son squanders his inheritance but his father rejoices when he comes home, and the older son who obeyed the whole time is left resentful. Or the prodigal of the wandering sheep in Matthew 18.

You need a helper that will enable you to explore scripture from where your heart is currently, not from a spoon-fed content calendar. Inside of Shepherd, there's an LLM chat. With your monthly subscription, you can have conversations about anything.

I'm currently reading Joshua in the Old Testament, and was having a conversation yesterday with Shepherd about it. It's like having a private group study and it helps me really understand what I'm reading and the significance of certain parts of the story.

If you click the little clock icon at the top right of the Shepherd chat (you need a $4.99/month subscription to unlock this feature), you can see your chat history and go back into any chat at any given time, continuing a conversation.

With this information, your verse of the day can then be tailored to what you're currently exploring. I can opt-in to feed some information about the last few recent chats to the AI prompt that requests for a verse of the day. In my case, I could get a verse of the day directly related to Achan's sin in the Old Testament. This is invaluable because as a student of scripture, it will help me make connections and bring new thoughts into my head that would've taken me longer to unlock on my own.

AI-native app experiences can accelerate your learning in profound ways. People often say that there's not enough time in a lifetime to learn the things you want. An AI-tailored education based app experience doesn't solve this, but at least will increase the amount of things you can learn and understand in one lifetime.

This is just one example. Once your verse of the day is tailored to you, you could unlock entire lesson plans generated on the fly by Shepherd. The more you chat in the app, the more tailored your experience gets and the further along you can get in your understanding.