{"slug": "campuscue-an-offline-ai-that-turns-confusing-college-notices-into-clear-next", "title": "CampusCue: An Offline AI That Turns Confusing College Notices Into Clear Next Steps", "summary": "A developer built CampusCue, an open-source tool that converts lengthy college notices into structured action plans with deadlines, eligibility criteria, required documents, action items and warnings. The application runs an open-weight Gemma model locally via Ollama so private documents are processed on the student's own machine, and it preserves page references so users can verify each extracted detail against the original notice.", "body_md": "*This is a submission for the [Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend](https://dev.to/challenges/hacktoberfest-weekend-2026-10-01)*\n\nHave you ever received a 5-page college notice and thought:\n\n\"Okay... but what exactly am I supposed to do?\"\n\nThat was the problem I wanted to solve for a friend.\n\nCollege students regularly receive scholarship notices, exam circulars, registration announcements, internship opportunities, and administrative PDFs written in formal language. The information is there, but figuring out **what actually matters** can take a surprising amount of time.\n\nSo I built **CampusCue**.\n\nCampusCue takes a college notice and turns it into a simple action plan:\n\nInstead of simply asking AI to summarize a PDF, CampusCue focuses on the question a student actually cares about:\n\n**\"What do I need to do?\"**\n\nThe goal was to build something useful for one real person first, rather than trying to build a generic AI product for everyone.\n\n🚀 **Live Demo:**\n\n[https://campus-cue.vercel.app/](https://campus-cue.vercel.app/)\n\nThe main workflow is:\n\n**Upload notice → Analyze locally → Get action plan → Ask questions → Verify the source**\n\nThe application is designed around a simple principle:\n\n**Don't just summarize the notice. Make it actionable.**\n\n💻 **GitHub Repository:**\n\n[https://github.com/HITESHVERMA01/CampusCue](https://github.com/HITESHVERMA01/CampusCue)\n\nThe repository contains the frontend, backend, AI integration, document processing, prompts, and setup instructions.\n\nThe project is open source so that the workflow can be inspected, modified, extended, and reused.\n\nCampusCue is built around **local open-weight AI**, rather than depending on a closed AI API.\n\n```\nCollege Notice\n      │\n      ▼\n PDF / Image Upload\n      │\n      ▼\n Document Extraction\n      │\n      ▼\n Page-aware Text\n      │\n      ▼\n Local Gemma via Ollama\n      │\n      ▼\n Structured Analysis\n      │\n      ├── Deadline\n      ├── Eligibility\n      ├── Documents\n      ├── Action Items\n      └── Warnings\n      │\n      ▼\n CampusCue UI\n      │\n      ├── Action Checklist\n      ├── Questions\n      └── Source Verification\n```\n\nOne of the most important design decisions was keeping **page references** with extracted information.\n\nIf CampusCue says:\n\n\"The deadline is October 12.\"\n\nthe user can see where that information came from in the original notice.\n\nThis makes the system more useful than a black-box summary and helps reduce the risk of blindly trusting an AI-generated answer.\n\nThis is the part of the project that matters most to me.\n\nCollege notices can contain information that students may not want to send to an external AI service.\n\nA traditional cloud-based approach could look like:\n\n```\nPrivate Document\n      ↓\nInternet\n      ↓\nThird-party AI API\n      ↓\nAI Response\n```\n\nCampusCue can instead run the core AI workflow locally:\n\n```\nPrivate Document\n      ↓\nStudent's Computer\n      ↓\nOllama\n      ↓\nGemma\n      ↓\nAnswer\n```\n\nThat changes what is possible.\n\nWhen using the local model, the document can be processed on the user's own computer instead of requiring it to be sent to a third-party AI API.\n\nOnce the model is available locally, the core inference doesn't require paying for every question or document analyzed through a cloud API.\n\nThe application isn't permanently tied to one proprietary model or provider.\n\nThe local model can be replaced and the AI pipeline can be experimented with or extended.\n\nBecause the model runs locally, the core AI functionality can work without an internet connection once the required software and model are installed.\n\nFor me, this is the real value of open innovation:\n\n**The AI isn't just something I'm calling. It's something I can actually run, inspect, change, and build around.**\n\nComing soon / [add DevRelay session here]\n\nI also used the build process to explore how an AI-assisted development workflow could help move from an idea to a working product quickly.\n\nCampusCue uses an open-weight Gemma model through Ollama as the core reasoning engine for understanding college notices and turning them into actionable information.\n\nThe model isn't simply generating a chatbot response — it is part of the core document-analysis workflow.\n\nCampusCue is intentionally small right now.\n\nThe next things I'd like to explore are:\n\nBut the most important next step isn't another feature.\n\nIt's giving CampusCue to the friend I built it for and seeing whether it actually makes their life easier.\n\nBecause that was the point of the challenge in the first place.\n\n**Build for one person. Solve one real problem. Then see where it goes.**", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/campuscue-an-offline-ai-that-turns-confusing-college-notices-into-clear-next", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/hitesh_verma_adc5d7d9c533/campuscue-an-offline-ai-that-turns-confusing-college-notices-into-clear-next-steps-33oe", "published_at": "2026-10-05 05:36:07+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-05 05:42:55.912896+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "ai-tools", "ai-products", "natural-language-processing"], "entities": ["CampusCue", "Gemma", "Ollama", "HITESHVERMA01", "GitHub", "Vercel", "Hacktoberfest"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/campuscue-an-offline-ai-that-turns-confusing-college-notices-into-clear-next", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/campuscue-an-offline-ai-that-turns-confusing-college-notices-into-clear-next.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/campuscue-an-offline-ai-that-turns-confusing-college-notices-into-clear-next.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/campuscue-an-offline-ai-that-turns-confusing-college-notices-into-clear-next.jsonld"}}