Intro

I study the Bible on my phone everyday. One thing I like to do is talk to an LLM as I go to help clarify things, understand more context, or just ask any dumb question I’m embarrassed to ask others.

I was always jumping between the Bible app and my LLM, and my Bible study chats would get lost in other chats I have with the LLM. That’s why I built Shepherd. An iOS Bible app that has an LLM chat built into it.

Grok helped me write the app in about 3 weeks, gpt-4o provided the logo and design system.

It's designed to be a place where you can simply read the Bible with no distractions, and you have an LLM to help you explore ideas and concepts that you're studying.

The other day I was searching for Psalm 39 on the internet. Look at all the noise on this page. That's not going to happen in Shepherd. Shepherd is designed to keep you focused on the Word.

The Details

There are currently 4 (of the most popular) translations to choose from (KJV, ESV, NIV, NLT).

Inside of each chapter, you can click any verse to open a bottom sheet that contains a few options:

highlight: highlights text of the selected verses
note: opens a text input to write a note about the selected verses
share: opens device share tray
chat: opens the LLM with the selected verses pre-filled in the text input
bookmark: saves your spot for later, you only get one bookmark and can only save one spot

Notes and highlights can be accessed later from the Profile tab. I think I'll add searching, filtering and tagging to them at some point for better organization. When reading the Bible, I don't believe it's necessary to follow exactly what's going on as you go. Of course you want to understand storylines and meaning but the act of reading the Bible alone is enough. Just to sit and be with God's Word regularly. The point of the notes, highlights and LLM is to help you with your understanding and to organize your thoughts in one place. If you have a monthly subscription ($4.99/month), you can also save and come back to chats you have with the LLM. Shepherd is a place where you can keep all your Bible notes, filter and search them, and be able to come back to your study and edit them at anytime. Your understanding of scripture changes over time. You can keep an organized lifelong record of how your faith evolves over time with Shepherd.

Shepherd, the LLM chat, can be accessed from the bottom sheet when you select a verse, or the bottom tab. Shepherd currently uses gpt-4o. I think an interesting option is to offer more customization to your LLM in your app, which would perhaps swap 4o for a different model, adjust the temperature or other parameters of the prompt, or maybe even engage with a custom model.

If you're a subscriber, you get unlimited chat and you can save your history and revisit any thread at any time. I have found an LLM to be extremely helpful for me in my understanding of the Bible. It's so convenient to have one a tap away from scripture. I often am reading through chapters and wondering why something is the way it is, or just want to explore some concepts a little deeper. Using an LLM is such a quick and convenient way to have my questions answered.

Side note: if I turn up the temperate, frequency and presence penalty even just a little bit to my LLM prompt, it's quite scary the output I was finding in chats as the context of the chat grew (the longer the chat was). Example, look at the eerie output of the below response from the LLM with a higher temperature, frequency and presence penalties. It goes from normal to non-understandable really quickly.

Conclusion

Building Shepherd was inspired by a product I wish I had, and driven completely by my own curiosity. Just like every other app I've made. The monthly subscription of $4.99/month is currently at 2 subscribers after launch last week. A couple 5-star reviews came in as well.

I'm optimistic that Shepherd could appeal to a lot of folks and hope to get that number up to 2k subscribers. I'd like to just make it a simple and clean product with no distractions.

Check out the landing page and download the iOS for it here. The landing page looks pretty slick on mobile, showing off a slick image made by gpt-4o.