Illuminate is a Bible reading app with dynamic, AI-powered commentary. As a Christian, I often encounter passages in the Bible that confuse me. While there is a long tradition of commentaries and sermons interpreting the Bible, finding the right information can be difficult and disrupt the meditative act of reading.

When large language models came about, I was interested in learning how to use them in a hands-on way, so I built Illuminate using Next.js and GPT-4. It occurred to me that the training data for LLMs include a lot of Bible interpretation texts that could be applied to help answer questions while reading.

From a product standpoint, I'm proud of the AI interface within Illuminate. It uses a typical chat interface for flexibility, allowing users to ask any question. But it also offers a set of "instant answers" - default prompts that I intentionally curated to answer a range of important questions about a passage, including

• Summaries of previous events in the book to help readers jump back in
• Other Bible chapters with similar themes
• Reflective questions to meditate on and apply the passage

Because these prompts are static, the answers to them can be prefetched and surfaced to the user instantly.

To my knowledge, Illuminate was one of the first products to apply LLMs to Bible reading. There are now many others. Using AI for spiritual practice is still unproven and has its limitations, including LLMs' well-known accuracy issues and the general challenges of individual Bible interpretation outside of community. Despite these limitations, I've found Illuminate to be a valuable starting point. Illuminate was mentioned in a Christianity Today article on this topic.