Writing on the practice and procurement of AI in civic, accessibility and legal work — the records and proceedings institutions depend on. Observations from people who do this work, not vendors describing it from the outside.
The record matters more than the recording. A court transcript, a parliamentary Hansard, a captioned proceeding — these are not just text files. They are the official memory of institutions, and the standard they are held to is accuracy, not approximation.
Artificial intelligence is arriving in all of this work at once. Some of it will be genuinely useful. Some of it will be sold on promises that the people producing these records know cannot be kept. The difference between the two is rarely visible from a procurement document or a product demonstration — it only becomes clear in the practice.
CAL Notes is where I write about that difference. I have worked as a court and parliamentary reporter since 1989, producing court transcripts, parliamentary records and live captioning, and the practice I lead now builds AI tooling for the same work. That gives me a particular vantage point: close enough to the technology to know what it can do, and close enough to the practice to know what it must not be allowed to break.
These are notes, deliberately — considered observations rather than marketing, written for the people who carry responsibility for these records and the institutions that procure the systems to produce them. I do not name competitors and I try not to advocate. I describe what I see, and let readers draw their own conclusions.
Accuracy in the records that matter most.
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A Bradley Reporting publication · Brisbane, Australia