After last weeks post about moving my tasks back into Evernote, this week I want to chat a bit about how I’m doubling down on my note taking and document storage, and its all because of Ai Powered Search.
i used evernote for alot of personal and business info as well. My now 21 year old daughter was surprised and delighted when we were talking about her childhood i pulled up from evernote one of her drawings she did of me when she was in middle school lol
I name my notes similar to you ( i just try to save them how i would search for them later
Love that. Never thought of storing my kids drawings on EN. I have a drawer full! Also got my daughters high school art projects lol... don't want to throw them away!
I used this for the first time in a useful way today. I was filling in some insurance forms and needed certain dates. I knew they were in EN, popped in the AI search and got them within seconds - without needing to open a note. That is very poerful and useful. As I progress my migration back to EN, I see this tool becoming more useful.
I started using Evernote in 2008. At the time, I had a young family, worked full time, took a 2/3 course load at the local community college, and was a member of the Keizer City Council. I was busy! I had a lot of paper, most of it stored in file folders in a cabinet. I'd pull out the files I'd need for a council meeting (labeled by topic), but I found invariably I'd be in a meeting and not have a file I needed. An early gen ScanSnap, an iPad, and Evernote solved that problem for me. Now I had everything I'd need, where ever I was. (I was profiled by Brooks Duncan at DocumentSnap in 2011. You can read it here: https://www.documentsnap.com/reader-story-accessing-documents-on-the-go/)
A few years ago I began collecting vinyl records, and cataloging them in EN. I set the "created date" as the original date of the release, use tags for #12Inch and #7Inch, and another for #KISS, my favorite band. The note itself includes catalog number, release date, country of origin, price paid, release notes from Discogs, a photo of the album cover, and a link to the release in my Discogs account.
I'd be curious to hear how you and others catalogue your vinyl collection.
Nice. I'm adding new vinyl to Evernote right now. Went to the local store earlier and came away with far too much. I have notebook for "Music Collection" and then a standard template stored in the template gallery. I don't use tags but I always keep the name of the artist first in the title then the album name. Just found out I can use Ai Powered search to list everything by and artist: All notes with "Santana" in the title or All notes with "Dream Theater" in the title.
I'll make a note to write something up about cataloguing music and add the template as a download.
Would've loved toof seen KISS live back in the day. So much drama and theatre!
I use EN to store most of the types of Notes you mentioned and lots more. For example, I scan everything I need to keep and store it into EN, including all the tax documents I receive during the year, so when time comes to prepare my tax returns, all the documents I need are readily available in that’s years tax notebook. I also, store lots of references, like news articles of interest, medical info and medical records, etc.
On the other hand, what I don’t like about the AI search feature, is that you just about have to know the correct AI wording for the question to get result you seek. For example, if I ask “what is the last date of my water bill” I get that the date is not shown, but if I ask “what is the date shown on my last water bill” it retrieves the date.
I also don’t like that the AI search returns lots of unrelated search hits. These hits, appear to be pulled based a Boolean search using the “OR” operator. In other words, in the AI search for the last water bill, I also get hits on unrelated notes that are not water bills, as long as one or more of the keywords Bill, Date, etc. are included in the result and most of these are completely unrelated to water bills. EN has got a long way to go to get accurate search results that are limited to the Notes specified in the search, instead of returning all notes that match some of the keywords in the search query.
Agree, the Ai search needs very descriptive notes. I think one thing hindering them a little is the fact they are trying to send as little info as possible to the Ai so results can be strange.
I use Evernote for meeting minutes, and I'll often include the .pdf of presentations or other documents, pictures of the people on the call, and sometimes a sound recording clip. I have my organ sheet music catalogued in Evernote. All sorts of random ideas, tasks, documents, web clips can make their way into Evernote. I have a growing database of restaurants, and I scan the menus and tag the city. OCR is very impressive and helps with search. I wish voice recordings could be transcribed for additional search. I am always looking for ways to improve my use of Evernote.
I've mentioned a few times about having audio transcriptions. I'd find this really useful as, like you I use voice notes quite a bit. I think (?) one of the video editing apps that Bending Spoons has this so they know how to implement it... hopeful!
I have digitized my life using Evernote. I send many gmails to Evernote to use as reminders. I use ScanSnap to send a wide variety of documents to Evernote and the quality of my camera in the Pixel 8 Pro and Pixel Fold is outstanding. The images are sharp enough to send to Evernote and contain data I can find. I try to tag all entries. I call the whole process the Ludsin Method. I will use AI more often thanks to your suggestion.
Yes, you can use ScanSnap to find all the folders in your EN account and select the folder you want to save the scan into. I use ScanSnap all the time, but when I’m home, I use my Brother Printer to scan documents. Brother provides an Evernote app that once you authorize it to access your account, it stores the scan directly into EN, which I find even more useful than ScanSnap, particularly when you have to scan multiple pages. I just place all the pages into the document feeder, start the EN app on the printer and a few minutes later a perfectly scanned PDF is saved into my EN account.
Thanks. I think I need to invest in a scanner. Getting a little tired of photographing everything on my phone all the time. I can imagine a scanner works 100 times better.
I use for business and personal private data since 2011. For business, there is a problem of unfair competence due in part to Microsoft, some customers does not allow access to Evernote note sharing domain, only using OneDrive. I overcome this in some way by using export note to PDF.
I also like Evernote AI Search service because independently of which GUI language you selected, it is really multi-language. I've got notes and create notes in many different languages.
Although my mother tonge it is not in the Evernote GUI languages, I can ask in that language and receive the answer in the same language by AI. So this AI is an external functionality in Evernote for sure, otherwise the GUI languages list would be longer.
I expect and hope that the information they share with AI core it is not undisclosed.
The multi-lingual aspects of the Ai are great. Whatever language OpenAi uses Evernote can use. The Ai search does a standard search first and only sends 4 notes worth of data over to the Ai and it doesn't get trained on note data.
This explains a bit more about how the process works:
i used evernote for alot of personal and business info as well. My now 21 year old daughter was surprised and delighted when we were talking about her childhood i pulled up from evernote one of her drawings she did of me when she was in middle school lol
I name my notes similar to you ( i just try to save them how i would search for them later
Love that. Never thought of storing my kids drawings on EN. I have a drawer full! Also got my daughters high school art projects lol... don't want to throw them away!
I used this for the first time in a useful way today. I was filling in some insurance forms and needed certain dates. I knew they were in EN, popped in the AI search and got them within seconds - without needing to open a note. That is very poerful and useful. As I progress my migration back to EN, I see this tool becoming more useful.
Nice. I've found it useful to do some advanced searches in natural language instead of using lots of : AND OR's.
I started using Evernote in 2008. At the time, I had a young family, worked full time, took a 2/3 course load at the local community college, and was a member of the Keizer City Council. I was busy! I had a lot of paper, most of it stored in file folders in a cabinet. I'd pull out the files I'd need for a council meeting (labeled by topic), but I found invariably I'd be in a meeting and not have a file I needed. An early gen ScanSnap, an iPad, and Evernote solved that problem for me. Now I had everything I'd need, where ever I was. (I was profiled by Brooks Duncan at DocumentSnap in 2011. You can read it here: https://www.documentsnap.com/reader-story-accessing-documents-on-the-go/)
A few years ago I began collecting vinyl records, and cataloging them in EN. I set the "created date" as the original date of the release, use tags for #12Inch and #7Inch, and another for #KISS, my favorite band. The note itself includes catalog number, release date, country of origin, price paid, release notes from Discogs, a photo of the album cover, and a link to the release in my Discogs account.
I'd be curious to hear how you and others catalogue your vinyl collection.
Nice. I'm adding new vinyl to Evernote right now. Went to the local store earlier and came away with far too much. I have notebook for "Music Collection" and then a standard template stored in the template gallery. I don't use tags but I always keep the name of the artist first in the title then the album name. Just found out I can use Ai Powered search to list everything by and artist: All notes with "Santana" in the title or All notes with "Dream Theater" in the title.
I'll make a note to write something up about cataloguing music and add the template as a download.
Would've loved toof seen KISS live back in the day. So much drama and theatre!
I use EN to store most of the types of Notes you mentioned and lots more. For example, I scan everything I need to keep and store it into EN, including all the tax documents I receive during the year, so when time comes to prepare my tax returns, all the documents I need are readily available in that’s years tax notebook. I also, store lots of references, like news articles of interest, medical info and medical records, etc.
On the other hand, what I don’t like about the AI search feature, is that you just about have to know the correct AI wording for the question to get result you seek. For example, if I ask “what is the last date of my water bill” I get that the date is not shown, but if I ask “what is the date shown on my last water bill” it retrieves the date.
I also don’t like that the AI search returns lots of unrelated search hits. These hits, appear to be pulled based a Boolean search using the “OR” operator. In other words, in the AI search for the last water bill, I also get hits on unrelated notes that are not water bills, as long as one or more of the keywords Bill, Date, etc. are included in the result and most of these are completely unrelated to water bills. EN has got a long way to go to get accurate search results that are limited to the Notes specified in the search, instead of returning all notes that match some of the keywords in the search query.
Agree, the Ai search needs very descriptive notes. I think one thing hindering them a little is the fact they are trying to send as little info as possible to the Ai so results can be strange.
Still very much a work in progress.
I use Evernote for meeting minutes, and I'll often include the .pdf of presentations or other documents, pictures of the people on the call, and sometimes a sound recording clip. I have my organ sheet music catalogued in Evernote. All sorts of random ideas, tasks, documents, web clips can make their way into Evernote. I have a growing database of restaurants, and I scan the menus and tag the city. OCR is very impressive and helps with search. I wish voice recordings could be transcribed for additional search. I am always looking for ways to improve my use of Evernote.
I've mentioned a few times about having audio transcriptions. I'd find this really useful as, like you I use voice notes quite a bit. I think (?) one of the video editing apps that Bending Spoons has this so they know how to implement it... hopeful!
I have digitized my life using Evernote. I send many gmails to Evernote to use as reminders. I use ScanSnap to send a wide variety of documents to Evernote and the quality of my camera in the Pixel 8 Pro and Pixel Fold is outstanding. The images are sharp enough to send to Evernote and contain data I can find. I try to tag all entries. I call the whole process the Ludsin Method. I will use AI more often thanks to your suggestion.
Does the ScanSnap scan directly into Evernote or into an import folder?
Yes, you can use ScanSnap to find all the folders in your EN account and select the folder you want to save the scan into. I use ScanSnap all the time, but when I’m home, I use my Brother Printer to scan documents. Brother provides an Evernote app that once you authorize it to access your account, it stores the scan directly into EN, which I find even more useful than ScanSnap, particularly when you have to scan multiple pages. I just place all the pages into the document feeder, start the EN app on the printer and a few minutes later a perfectly scanned PDF is saved into my EN account.
Thanks. I think I need to invest in a scanner. Getting a little tired of photographing everything on my phone all the time. I can imagine a scanner works 100 times better.
I use for business and personal private data since 2011. For business, there is a problem of unfair competence due in part to Microsoft, some customers does not allow access to Evernote note sharing domain, only using OneDrive. I overcome this in some way by using export note to PDF.
I also like Evernote AI Search service because independently of which GUI language you selected, it is really multi-language. I've got notes and create notes in many different languages.
Although my mother tonge it is not in the Evernote GUI languages, I can ask in that language and receive the answer in the same language by AI. So this AI is an external functionality in Evernote for sure, otherwise the GUI languages list would be longer.
I expect and hope that the information they share with AI core it is not undisclosed.
The multi-lingual aspects of the Ai are great. Whatever language OpenAi uses Evernote can use. The Ai search does a standard search first and only sends 4 notes worth of data over to the Ai and it doesn't get trained on note data.
This explains a bit more about how the process works:
https://tamingthetrunk.substack.com/i/138128044/how-does-evernote-ai-powered-search-work