At CambsNews, we don’t just report the news—we distill it. In an era where public meetings stretch for hours and YouTube uploads bury insights beneath layers of procedural fog, we’ve built something different: a set of AI-powered tools designed to extract clarity, context, and quotable wisdom from the messiness of civic life.
🔧 The Stack: OLLAMA, LLMs, and Fabric
Our system is built on a modular architecture combining:
- OLLAMA: A local orchestration layer for running large language models (LLMs) efficiently on in-house hardware. It gives us control, privacy, and speed.
- LLMs: These models—trained on vast corpora of text—can summarize, extract quotes, and identify key themes from unstructured content like video transcripts and meeting minutes.
- Fabric: An open-source framework that acts as a bridge between our frontend and AI backend. Fabric excels at chaining together AI tasks—like transcription, summarization, and tagging—into auditable, recoverable workflows. It’s designed for transparency and modularity, making it ideal for civic-grade tooling.
🖥️ The Frontend: Fast, Focused, and Forensic
Our web interface allows journalists to:
- Upload or link to long-form content (e.g., council meetings, public hearings)
- Trigger AI workflows via Fabric
- Receive structured outputs: summaries, quotes, source references, and thematic breakdowns
All of this runs on our in-house AI server, powered by 24GB NVIDIA GPUs. That means no cloud latency, no vendor lock-in, and full control over how models are tuned and deployed.
🗣️ From Hours to Insights
Instead of watching a two-hour meeting, our reporters get:
- A concise summary of what was said
- Direct quotes with timestamps
- Source attribution for every claim
- Thematic tags to guide follow-up reporting
This isn’t just a time-saver—it’s a trust-builder. Readers get articles grounded in verifiable, auditable AI outputs. Reporters get more time to investigate, contextualize, and write.
📝 Even This Article? AI-Assisted.
Yes, even this article—written in piecemeal drafts—was structured and polished by AI. That’s not a gimmick. It’s a reflection of how we work: human insight, machine precision, and a relentless focus on clarity.
🤖 AI Is Here. Let’s Make It Work for Us.
Whatever you think about AI, it’s not going away. At CambsNews, we’ve chosen to embrace it—not as a replacement for journalism, but as a tool to make journalism faster, clearer, and more accountable. We believe civic infrastructure deserves the same level of innovation and respect as any other domain. And with AI, we’re building tools that honour that belief.
