It’s a Tuesday, a little after nine in the evening. Somewhere in a Scottish market town a woman has just gotten back from the hospital after waiting for her Mum to settle for the night. Now home, she is able to finally look at the letter she has been worrying about.

Her Mum is being discharged next week and nobody has asked her how that is supposed to work. She has not been asked where she will live, or who will be looking after her. All she has is this letter, and a leaflet from months ago that mentioned a carer’s centre and something about the importance of breaks. And while interested and in need of the information, she has never rung the number on it because the centre keeps office hours and she only has evenings free.

Tonight she has the letter, a question she has been avoiding for a while, and no one to ask until the morning.

While not based on a specific person, this scenario shows a number of the key issues carers struggle with and what they stated as part of the Carers UK’s 60th anniversary study where carers were asked to complete the following sentence: “I want to see a future for carers where…” Specifically, “more opportunities to take a break from caring”, and “more information and advice for carers which is easily accessible and tailored to carers’ individual needs”.

I cannot help with the first problem. However, in my work with OmniIndex and Boudica AI, I can talk about the importance of accessible, accurate, information.

Boudica Community AI

When it comes to accessing critical information, it’s crucial there are no additional layers of complexity or technical knowledge required that get in the way.

In this scenario, our carer just wants to be better at looking after her mother. Every AI announcement she has seen is about efficiency and doing more with less. She isn't a business. She doesn't want to be more efficient at looking after her mother. She wants someone to tell her what to do next, in plain words, and she doesn't want that someone to be a company on the other side of the world that keeps whatever she types.

Boudica Community is an AI platform where answers are only drawn from selected, verifiable, sources. It is hosted locally, with all the control and power going to whoever it is owning and running it.

For the purposes of this scenario and blog, I made a demo called ‘Ask Lanmoor Carers’. It runs on a gaming laptop with a 4060 with none of its data ever having to leave the laptop: not the queries, answers, audits. This means anyone using it for sensitive, private, topics such as their Mum’s care can be sure they’re not having their personal questions uploaded or accessed by anyone other than that Community’s admins. Nothing she types goes to ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini or any other outside AI service. Visitors' questions are kept for 90 days, then deleted.

It was trained on public content relevant to our woman: a local Carer’s Centre’s website, the council’s carers section, regional dementia charity’s monthly lists, and the national benefits pages as well as relevant contact and support data. That is the whole of what it knows, and when the answer is not in there, it says so and tells her who to ring.

The careful part of this is what it is not allowed to say, and that is set by whoever runs it, not by us. For example, if she had typed certain phrases, the ones that mean she can't go on, the AI model would not have been asked at all with it being bypassed due to the rules in place. Instead, a reply written by a person (in this case myself) would have given her the Samaritans number, (116 123), as well as the primary emergency telephone number in her region (999).

Ask Lanmoor Carers Demo