Acolyte: The Asimovian Public Records Bot

Story & Concept:
Inspired by the methodical robots of Asimov's 'I, Robot', the inscrutable intelligence of 'Ex Machina', and the practical data needs of a 'Public Services' scraper, 'Acolyte' is a specialized Robotic Process Automation (RPA) service. It is designed for professionals like lawyers, real estate developers, lobbyists, and journalists who need to stay informed about the proceedings of local governments but lack the time to manually sift through mountains of public records. Acolyte acts as a tireless digital assistant, governed by a set of core principles reminiscent of Asimov's Laws of Robotics, ensuring ethical and precise data collection. The goal is to create a bot whose output is so accurate and well-formatted that it passes a 'Clerical Turing Test'—its intelligence briefings are indistinguishable from those prepared by a meticulous human aide.

How it Works:
1. Client Onboarding: A client subscribes to the service, providing a list of municipal or public agency websites to monitor (e.g., city council, zoning board) and a specific set of keywords (e.g., a project name, an address, 'zoning variance', 'environmental impact').

2. The Acolyte Bot: A robust RPA bot, built with an accessible platform like UiPath Community or Power Automate Desktop, runs on a predetermined schedule from a low-cost cloud VM or a dedicated local machine.

3. Intelligent Navigation & Extraction: The bot navigates the complex and often archaic public websites. It uses pattern recognition and contextual analysis to identify and download new public documents like meeting agendas, minutes, and public notices. This goes beyond simple scraping; it's designed to handle inconsistent site layouts, much like a human would.

4. The 'Asimovian' Core Logic:
- First Law - Integrity: The bot will only access and download publicly available information and will never attempt to bypass authentication or access restricted sections. All sources are cited.
- Second Law - Obedience: The bot will execute the client's keyword search and reporting format precisely. It will use built-in or low-cost, pay-as-you-go OCR (Optical Character Recognition) APIs to process scanned PDFs, ensuring no information is missed.
- Third Law - Self-Preservation: The bot meticulously logs all its actions, including successful retrievals and any errors encountered (e.g., website down, broken link, unreadable document). This creates an audit trail and ensures reliability.

5. Delivery of Intelligence: When a keyword is detected, the bot automatically compiles a concise email report for the client. The report includes the keyword found, a text snippet for context, and a direct link to the source document. This allows the professional to take immediate, informed action without any manual search effort, making the service a high-value, niche solution.