Monthly Reflection: Jamal (Beauty) – On the Language of the House of Justice

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Hi friends!

In recent months we’ve been gifted several letters from the Universal House of Justice:

• the 19 March 2025 letter about marriage and family life,
• the Naw-Ruz message to the Baha’is in Iran,
• the 8 April message joyfully announcing that the conditions now exist for the building of a House of Worship in the vicinity of Manila,
• and the 2025 Ridvan message.

These missives from the head of our Faith are priceless and what I absolutely relish (and this is just my personal take) is the difference in language and tone in all the messages, from the exquisite flowery prose of the letter to the Baha’is in Iran in comparison to the brilliantly forthright delivery of the 19 March message, and the rallying cry and loving encouragement of the Ridvan message. Such masterful use of language!

For several years now, we’ve released audio recordings of messages from the Universal House of Justice. In this newsletter, I’d like to pull back the veil a little about the process.

Every year, members of the Baha’i Blog team eagerly await the release of the Ridvan message—like cars lined up at the starting line, engines warmed and raring to go! With a reader at the ready, as soon as the message is made available on the Baha’i Reference Library, we get to work. Sometimes this involves recording studios, sometimes it involves humble phones and makeshift recording spaces. Depending on the availability of the reader and the length of the message, a reading can be completed in a few hours, or within a few days but it always involves several takes of words, lines, sentences or entire paragraphs in order to get it right. (When a message is released that we aren’t anticipating, it’s all the more chaotically joyful to get up and running!)

Then we painstakingly review the recording and make notes for an audio editor. This step in the process is critical as one can only imagine the level of thought, care and attention to detail that go into the messages and the last thing we want is for an audio reading to include mistakes. It’s also funny how the human brain works: sometimes a word that is misread is repeatedly misread in take after take. So our tireless readers sometimes have to go back and record parts of the message again.

The process of editing the audio takes considerable time.

And then the final product is carefully reviewed again, word for word and line by line, before the audio reading is released.

The process is rarely straightforward and often looks more like this: recording-reviewing-recording-editing-reviewing-recording-editing-reviewing-reviewing-reviewing-publishing. The audio reading of the 28 November 2023 message, which is 2 hours and 18 minutes long, was a particular triumph for the team! And you’ll notice in the description accompanying the audio recordings how thankful we are to each and every reader who gives us their time, attention and their voices so generously.

For recent recordings, we haven’t been thanking specific readers because we’ve begun experimenting with AI.

Here’s what we’ve learned so far:

• we never need to check to see if AI has misread or skipped a word
• our audio editor no longer needs to spend hours cutting out takes, or seamlessly stitching together words from one take into another
• AI struggles with Baha’i words and terminology; it takes effort to make those seemingly unfamiliar words as smooth as the familiar ones
• AI technology is astounding—the array of accents, voices and the level of energy and tone they each convey is mind-bogglingly diverse and varied
• while we’re getting better at controlling the delivery of the AI reader, nothing matches how a sincere soul reads a message from the House of Justice and then changes their inflection and cadence when the House is quoting the Central Figures of the Faith
• voice actors have serious skills that AI doesn’t hold a candle to, however, AI can create simple, reliable, steady and even audio readings
• there’s now a host of friends who are creating audio readings of recent messages using different AI voices, set to different specifications, with different end results
• lastly, we’re really not sure what this all means

I’m excited to see what the future holds as we consult and reflect on the creative process behind putting these readings together and how they are, or could be, or might better be of service to others.

If you haven’t already, we’d love for you to take a listen to the audio reading of the 2025 Ridvan message and to tell us what you think.

As the Ridvan Festival progresses, we’d like to share this gem of a newly released Studio Session based on the Words of Baha’u’llah about the significance of this day.

And last but certainly not least, Cherie continues to work on creating marvellous templates that you can adapt and modify to meet your needs. This month’s template is for a devotional program!

Happy and joyous 9th and 12th Days of Ridvan!

Posted by

Sonjel Vreeland

In her innermost heart, Sonjel is a stay-at-home parent and a bookworm with a maxed out library card but professionally she is a museologist with a background in English Literature. She currently lives on Prince Edward Island, an isle in the shape of a smile on the eastern Canadian coast. Sonjel is a writer who loves to listen to jazz when she's driving at night.