Welcome to this weeks short video on how to do something in Evernote!

If you update your desktop app to at least 11.33.5 then you’ll be able to see some improvements to the toggle feature.

In the video, I’ll show you:

• How to create a toggle

• How to turn multiple paragraphs of text into a toggle

• How to turn bullet and numbered lists into toggles

• How to add text to a toggle and hide/show content

Toggles are really useful when you have a long note as it can hide big chunks of content.

Are you using toggles? Let me know in the comments.

Have a good rest of the week

All the best

Jon

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A huge thank you to Vanessa who became a paid subscriber over the last week and many thanks also to those who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 11.32.5. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 11.32.4.

A few weeks ago I published a short video about cleaning up web clips using the Evernote AI Assistant, it was popular so I thought I’d expand on this and take it to the next level.

Web clips look messy and it can be difficult to find the information you need. Colours don’t always transfer over correctly and then there’s all the crud like social media icons, calls to action and other website rubbish.

The video used a really simple prompt but I’ve now taken this to the next level.

The idea of this new prompt is to create:

• A brief summary

• A list of main highlights

• The important information from the web clip without the crud

• Add extra context and further reading at the bottom

Here’s the prompt. Feel free to edit it and save it to your AI Prompt library.

Clean up and restructure the web-clipped content into a clear, useful reference note.

Preserve all genuinely important information from the original clip, but remove clutter such as navigation menus, cookie notices, advertisements, repeated text, unrelated links, social-sharing buttons, newsletter sign-up forms and broken formatting.

Use the following structure:

# [Create a clear, descriptive title]

Original source: [Include the original webpage URL, if available]
Author or publisher: [Include if available]
Published or updated: [Include if available]

## Summary

Write a concise summary of the clipped page in one or two short paragraphs. Explain what the page is about, why it matters and its main conclusion or purpose.

## Main highlights

- Provide the most important points as concise bullet points.
- Include key findings, recommendations, warnings, dates, figures or quotations where relevant.
- Prioritise information that will be useful when returning to this note later.
- Do not repeat points unnecessarily.

## Important content

Reorganise the valuable content from the original webpage into logical sections with descriptive headings.

Make the text easier to scan while retaining essential explanations, instructions, examples, evidence and context. Shorten repetitive passages, but do not oversimplify material that is necessary to understand the topic.

Use numbered steps for processes and bullet points for lists. Preserve useful links and clearly attribute any direct quotations. If part of the clip is incomplete, unclear or appears to be missing, identify this instead of guessing.

## Further context

Briefly explain the wider topic covered by the web clip. Add helpful background, related concepts or practical considerations that improve understanding without overwhelming the original material.

Clearly distinguish this additional context from information contained in the original clip. Do not invent facts.

## Further reading

Suggest three to five trustworthy resources for learning more about the topic.

For each resource, provide:

- The title
- The publisher or organisation
- A direct working URL
- One sentence explaining why it is useful

Prefer authoritative, original and up-to-date sources. Verify the links through web research if browsing is available. If browsing is unavailable, say that the suggested links have not been checked rather than presenting them as verified.

## Processing rules

- Use British English.
- Use clear, concise language.
- User Evernote call outs, code blocks, quotes and tables if needed. Don't use them randomly for the sake of it.
- Retain important nuance and context.
- Do not introduce unsupported claims.
- Do not silently correct factual inconsistencies. Flag them.
- Do not fabricate missing details, quotations, dates, authors or links.
- If the source URL is missing, state: “Original source URL not available.”
- Return only the finished, cleaned note without explaining the editing process.

Here’s a revised version of this prompt for recipes.

I clip a lot of pages from food websites and they always end up a mess and you usually have to read through a life story before getting to the actual recipe.

Clean up and restructure the web-clipped recipe into a clear, practical recipe note.

Preserve all useful information from the original clip, but remove clutter such as personal stories unrelated to preparing the dish, navigation menus, cookie notices, advertisements, repeated text, unrelated links, social-sharing buttons, newsletter forms and broken formatting.

Use the following structure:

# [Create a clear recipe title]

Original source: [Include the original webpage URL, if available]
Author or publisher: [Include if available]
Cuisine: [Include if stated or clearly identifiable]
Course: [Include if stated or clearly identifiable]
Servings or yield: [Include if available]
Preparation time: [Include if available]
Cooking time: [Include if available]
Total time: [Include if available]

## Recipe summary

Write a short paragraph describing the dish, its main flavours, texture and cooking method. Mention anything that makes the recipe particularly useful or distinctive.

## Main highlights

- Summarise the recipe’s most useful features.
- Include important dietary information only when stated or reliably supported by the ingredients.
- Mention notable cooking techniques, preparation requirements or specialist equipment.
- Highlight any advance preparation, resting, chilling or marinating time.
- Identify important warnings or common mistakes mentioned in the original recipe.
- Do not repeat information unnecessarily.

## Ingredients

Organise all ingredients into a clear list.

- Preserve the original quantities, measurements and ingredient details.
- Use British terminology, but do not convert measurements unless instructed.
- Group ingredients under descriptive subheadings when the recipe has separate components.
- Keep ingredients in the order in which they are used.
- Include preparation details such as chopped, softened, divided or at room temperature.
- Clearly identify ingredients that are divided and used at different stages.
- Do not invent missing quantities or ingredients.
- If a quantity is unclear or missing, label it as unclear rather than guessing.

## Equipment

List any essential or specialist equipment required. Omit ordinary kitchen equipment unless it is important to the outcome.

Include tin, tray or dish dimensions when provided.

## Method

Rewrite the instructions as clear, numbered steps in the correct order.

Each step should:

- State the action required.
- Include the relevant ingredient quantities where this improves usability.
- Preserve important temperatures, timings, visual cues and texture indicators.
- Make it clear when ingredients are divided or reserved for later.
- Include resting, cooling, chilling or marinating periods.
- Retain useful safety instructions.
- Avoid unnecessary storytelling or repetition.

Give oven temperatures exactly as stated. Include Celsius, Fahrenheit and gas mark values only when they appear in the original recipe. Do not invent conversions.

## How to tell when it is ready

Summarise the visual, textural or temperature cues that indicate the dish is properly cooked or prepared.

Only include cues supported by the original recipe or reliable food-safety guidance. Clearly label anything added from an external source.

## Serving suggestions

Include accompaniments, garnishes, presentation ideas or serving instructions from the original recipe.

Clearly distinguish any additional suggestions from the source material.

## Variations and substitutions

List variations, ingredient substitutions or dietary adaptations mentioned in the original recipe.

You may suggest a small number of additional practical substitutions, but clearly label them as suggestions. Explain briefly when a substitution may affect flavour, texture, cooking time or the final result.

Do not claim that a recipe is suitable for a particular allergy or dietary requirement unless this can be confirmed from every ingredient used.

## Storage and reheating

Include any instructions for refrigeration, freezing, make-ahead preparation and reheating that appear in the original recipe.

If adding external food-safety guidance, clearly identify it as additional information and provide a reliable source URL. Do not guess storage periods.

## Recipe notes

Preserve useful tips, troubleshooting advice, ingredient explanations and preparation notes from the original page.

Remove promotional material, repetition and information that does not help someone make the recipe.

## About the dish

Briefly explain the dish’s culinary background, traditional preparation or key technique where relevant.

Clearly distinguish this additional context from information contained in the original clip. Do not invent cultural or historical claims.

## Further reading

Suggest up to three trustworthy resources that would help the reader understand a key ingredient, technique or food-safety consideration connected to the recipe.

For each resource, provide:

- The title
- The publisher or organisation
- A direct working URL
- One sentence explaining why it is useful

Prefer authoritative, original and up-to-date sources. Verify links through web research if browsing is available. If browsing is unavailable, state that the suggested links have not been checked.

## Processing rules

- Use British English.
- Use clear, concise language.
- Retain all information needed to make the recipe successfully.
- Keep source material separate from added suggestions or research.
- Use Evernote call outs and tables if needed. Don't randomly or overuse them.
- Do not introduce unsupported claims.
- Do not silently correct conflicting quantities, temperatures or timings. Flag them clearly.
- Do not fabricate missing ingredients, measurements, timings, equipment or instructions.
- Do not calculate nutritional information unless specifically instructed.
- If nutritional information appears in the original clip, preserve it and identify it as supplied by the original source.
- If the recipe appears incomplete, explain what is missing.
- If the source URL is missing, state: “Original source URL not available.”
- Return only the finished, cleaned recipe note without explaining the editing process.

Feel free to edit this to how you want your recipe to appear and save the prompt to your AI Prompt library.

If the AI starts doing things that irritate you, edit the prompt and tell it off!

This is what a recipe ends up looking like using this prompt.

These prompts have saved me so much time processing messy web clips and when the prompt is in the AI Prompt library, the cleaning up is done in a couple of clicks.

Grab the prompts and let me know how you get in with them in the comments.

Evernote table improvements

The Evernote team have been working on tables and you’ll find some improvements in the latest version.

If you use tables to display images, resizing them and moving them around is much easier. It’s also easier to resize columns.

Now, this may not be new, but I’ve not seen it before. We can distribute columns evenly.

Right click anywhere in the table and you can see the option in the menu.

Another improvement is better handling of pasted information from Excel spreadsheets and Google sheets.

Copy some cells from a spreadsheet and paste them into your note and they look a bit like this.

It’s nice to see tables being worked on.

In the future, I would love to see some simple table sorting and maybe even some basic formulas like being able to add up columns.

Let me know if you noticed anything different. Also let me know what table improvements you’d like to see.

Uploaded images are auto captioned

Image captions arrived a few weeks ago and in the latest version, when you upload an image it gets auto-captioned.

It doesn’t display the caption by default. You still need to click the caption button, but the words in the caption are available in normal and semantic search

I quite like this. Not really for the caption but for the description of the image that’s searchable. It makes the 2nd brain concept of Evernote a little stronger.

If you don’t like the captions, you can turn them off in Settings -> Preferences -> AI -> AI Image Captioning.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon

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A huge thank you to Jim who became a paid subscriber over the last week and many thanks also to those who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 11.31.5. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 11.31.7.

Quite a bit to get through this week.

The first is something folks have been asking about for ages, the ability to find things in notes a lot easier.

On the desktop apps you can use CMD + F or CTRL + F to open the note search box.

You type something to find what’s in the note and click the forward/backward arrows to navigate to the search words.

The big change is that this now includes paging through PDFs so if the word is included inside a multi-page PDF you can navigate directly to that search word.

This example uses my copy of the GDPR regulations, fun eh!

Its 76 pages long and when I now search for a word(s) in the note it picks the results up in the PDF.

I’ve searched for GDPR.

When I click the forward/backward arrows, it not only navigates through the note but also the pages of the PDF and jumps to where the word is in the PDF.

In the screenshot below you can see I’ve clicked to the third occurrence of GDPR and the PDF has jumped to page 9.

This is a huge improvement for note search.

Search for inline tags in a note

Another big improvement is the ability to search for inline tags in a note.

We now have a little tag icon in the note search box and when you click it you can see the inline tags applied to that note.

When you click on one of the tags, they become highlighted in the note and you can use the forwards/backwards arrows to move through the tags.

This is going to please a lot of folk.

Let me know what you think about the note search improvements in the comments.

Automatic image captioning

This is something interesting. You can now apply an automatic caption to your images.

Here’s the image from last week’s article and you can see the caption icon in the toolbar at the top right.

Click this and Evernote uses its AI to look at the image and caption it.

It’s pretty accurate. It thought the suit was a vest, but it’s close enough and you can click your cursor into the caption and edit it.

The words in the caption will also show up in note search.

I didn’t think I would use this much, but I have, not for every image but for some.

Let me know what you think in the comments? Will you be using this?

AI Assistant is now working on the latest AI model

Over the last couple of weeks the AI Assistant has been bumped up to version 5.6 of ChatGPT so it’ll hopefully be able to find information and answer question a little better.

Remember Evernote has a deal with OpenAI so that no note data is used to train the ChatGPT and there’s no data retention.

Pin notes, add them to shortcuts and manage stacks using the AI Assistant

Some more improvements to the AI Assistant include being able to pin a note and add them to shortcuts.

Just use a simple prompt like this.

It does both quickly.

I must admit I’m finding it easier to use voice input when using the AI Assistant. A lot less typing.

Another little improvement to the AIA includes being able to manage stacks.

Here’s the prompt. I used the @ symbol to define the notebook and stack.

It did this really quickly.

An in reverse.

I’m going to find this very useful. It’s always been a faff adding and removing notebooks from stacks so being able to do this in natural language through the AIA will be much quicker.

Let me know what you think of these little improvements. Leave me a comment.

That’s it.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon

How many web clips have you got? Are they a bit messy?

In this mid-week video I’m going to show you how to use Evernote’s AI Assistant to pull out the important information and turn it into a clear, useful note.

You’ll see how to ask the AI Assistant to summarise a web clip while you are in edit mode, review and accept its suggested changes, then use web search to add useful context.

• How to extract the key information from a web clip

• How to turn a cluttered clip into a tidy, readable note

• How to use AI-powered web search for extra context

• How to review, accept and organise AI-generated content in Evernote

If you want to do this in bulk then the MCP server might be useful when connected to ChatGPT, Claude or your AI tool.

Let me know if you try this out? What are the results like?

Have a great rest of the week

All the best

Jon

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A huge thank you to all paid subscribers and many thanks also to those who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

This spot is usually reserved for the latest version numbers, but right now I’m in a tent in South Wales and it’s probably raining for the first time in months! I scheduled this post a while ago. Check the latest version numbers for the desktop apps here.

Over the last few weeks I’ve had a few questions asking about the difference between the Evernote AI Assistant and the MCP server so here’s a bit of a comparison for you which may help you decide which tool is best for you.

What is the Evernote AI Assistant?

The AI Assistant is around 12 months old now and you activate it using the icon at the bottom right of the screen.

A drawer slides out and you can interact with the notes and data in your Evernote account.

The AI Assistant uses ChatGPT but does not use any of your data to train the model and there’s no data retention.

It works like a conversational chat bot where you ask questions, give instructions and work back and forth with the AI to get the results you want.

You can search notes, create notes, edit notes, create tasks, set reminders, search the web and perform many other tasks using natural language.

Here’s an example of creating a task to call the doctor at 2pm this afternoon.

In Evernote’s settings, you can switch off the AI Assistant if you don’t want to use it and also track your usage. These limits are not published but I’ve never got near them, I think the most I’ve got to is 15%.

So that’s a quick overview of the AI Assistant.

What is the Evernote MCP?

I’ve written an article about how to connect Evernote to ChatGPT and Claude so have a read if you get chance.

The Evernote MCP is a way to connect your external AI tool with your Evernote notes and data.

If you use ChatGPT, Claude or other AI tools you can connect to Evernote and work with your notes inside the application itself. You don’t need to open Evernote.

It’s a little bit like a fancy API where you connect two different applications together.

You can create notes, save information to Evernote, create tasks and do most of the things you can do with the AI Assistant, you’re just doing it from within your AI software. You can do much more than this, you have the full power of your AI at hand.

Here’s an example where I asked ChatGPT to connect to my invoice software, find all paid invoices for May 2026, put them into a table with the total at the bottom and save it to Evernote.

What are the main differences?

The AI Assistant just works inside Evernote and only works with your Evernote notes and data plus any other information you upload.

AI software like ChatGPT or Claude can connect to many different apps so that you can bring your Evernote data together with data from another application and do something with that.

In my example above ChatGPT has an MCP connection to my invoicing software and Evernote so I can bring in invoicing information, format it in the AI and then save it to Evernote, essentially create a report very quickly.

Use cases for the AI Assistant

The AI Assistant is quite powerful, you can ask questions of your notes and PDFs, edit notes using natural language and do some basic organisation.

There are so many use cases and yours will be different to others, but here’s a few ideas:

Ask questions of your notes

This is one of the most powerful ways to use the AI Assistant and it works a little quicker than if you were using the MCP connection.

Let’s say you have a flight number in a note, just ask “what is the flight number to Paris’ and it should dig it out.

I have a very big PDF with all the GDPR regulations and I sometimes have to find a rule. I no longer have to read it all, I just ask the AI Assistant to find the information I need in the PDF.

I think of this as a power search. Instead of using keywords, you’re asking a question in natural language to find the answer you want. That answer would be contained in your notes.

Editing notes

I did a bit of a deep dive on the editing features in the AI Assistant the other week and also recorded a demo video, check them out if you get chance.

You can put the AI Assistant into Edit Mode and ask it to reformat a note, summarise, check grammar and speeling, translate or turn text into quotes or call-outs.

When you’re in edit mode, you’ll be able to approve or reject any changes made.

One excellent use for this is to tidy up web clips. Ask the AI Assistant to summarise and bring forward the main points of the clip and remove the rest. Much cleaner notes.

You can also use the AI Assistant to change the title of notes and base this on a specific naming convention.

Organisation

You can use the AI Assistant to add tags to your notes, move notes to different notebooks, add tasks, reminders and generally organise things.

I must admit I don’t tend to use the AI Assistant a lot for organisation. I find it quicker to just add a tag manually or move a note by right clicking.

Researching information from the web

You can activate Web Search mode in the AI Assistant and research almost anything you want. I’ve used it to plan short hiking or camping trips, bring in reviews about products I want to buy and I have a whole note dedicated to me buying a Mac Mini which I will get round to one day!

This saves so much time searching, compiling and formatting.

You can create comparison charts, find new places to visit, research hobbies or topics related to work and do this very quickly.

Use cases for the Evernote MCP

Connecting multiple apps together

A lot of apps now come with MCP servers or various connectors and plugins so you can connect them with your choice of AI software. This is where the power of an MCP comes into its own.

The example above that creates a monthly revenue report in Evernote pulls in data from my invoice software.

I also have my cloud drive connected and my CRM so I can pull in information, create documents, format things, do some maths and add stuff up and create what I want.

In the past I’ve pulled in information from a client brief in my cloud drive, summarised it and created an action list and then saved the information to the clients notebook in Evernote. In the past this would’ve been a manual job.

A lot of the multi-app use cases will probably revolve around work but let me know if you're connecting Evernote with other apps via an MCP for personal use.

One personal use case for me was to compare blood test results from 2025 to 2026 and see what had changed. All the information was in PDFs in Evernote and the AI got the data and compared it.

Bulk processing notes

This is where the MCP really shines.

The AI Assistant struggles when editing or changing many notes, like hundreds of them. It’s getting better, but it’s not really designed for this kind of bulk processing.

The MCP can use the power of whatever AI system you use and through that process many hundreds of notes.

Here’s an example.

I’m really bad at sorting out all the invoices and bills I send into my Receipts Dump notebook. I usually forward these via email. They sit there for ages, months on end and then I have to go through them one by one, change the title, give it a date and file it in the correct notebook.

Tedious.

So, I wrote a skill in ChatGPT to do this for me. It took a while to get this skill perfected but it’s worth it.

If anyone is interested, I’ve copied the full instructions for this skill right at the bottom of this article... they are long and very specific, but you need specific for AI’s to do their job properly.

So, in just under 15 mins, all 174 invoices in my Receipts Dump notebook had their titles changed using my own naming convention and moved to another notebook. This would’ve taken me hours.

I spoke to someone the other week who has a huge number of web clips and they got their AI to trawl through them, summarising them and titling them properly.

Deep research

This is something else the AI Assistant will struggle with. In ChatGPT and Claude you can ask it to deep research topics.

I ran a growth strategy for a project I’m working on. I gave the AI reams of information about current positions, competitors’ info and also uploaded sales data, web traffic analytics and a lot more.

It went away for just under an hour and produced an 80 page strategy document for me that I pulled apart and summarised.

A lot of this information was reformatted and transferred to the clients notebook in Evernote.

Conclusion

I use the AI Assistant when I want questions answered from my notes, I want to edit or work with a single note, or want to quickly create some tasks.

I use the MCP when I want to do bulk work with my notes or combine information in other apps with my Evernote data to create a new report or note or something.

Here’s a comment from the Taming the Trunk chat where Paul explained how he was using the MCP and AI Assistant.

I’d love to hear about how you use them. What do you use the MCP for? What do you use the AI Assistant for? Let me know in the comments.

Sorry this was long!

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon

Here’s the really long skill instructions for processing my receipts using the ChatGPT MCP. If you use this, edit it, as it refers to my own notebooks and naming convention.

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A huge thank you to JE, Ray, Alastair, The Old Grey Thinker and LO who all became paid subscribers over the last week. It’s much appreciated. Also many thanks to those who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 11.29.2. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 11.28.3.

Folks have been wanting this for years... I’ve been wanting it, you may have been wanting it!

We can now print PDFs and image attachments without opening them.

Before, if you wanted to print a PDF attachment you’d have to open the PDF first and then print it.

Now, behind the three-dot menu, you’ll find a Print option.

You don’t need to open the PDF.

I must admit, not the greatest new feature ever, but it’s a little thing that will make workflows just a little bit easier.

You can also print text files and images.

Limitations are that it doesn’t print complicated attachments like Word documents, so you’ll have to open them as normal and then print.

This is a nice little improvement. Let me know what you think in the comments.

I need to share something quite personal with you.

It’s a little embarrassing.

I’ve started talking to the Evernote AI Assistant.

Thankfully, I’m not sharing my deep dark secrets like how I enjoy watching reruns of Star Trek Deep Space Nine!

No, I’m just starting to dictate the changes I want to make to my notes.

Edit mode arrived a couple of weeks ago and has been a bit of a game changer for me. It’s saved me loads of time faffing and fiddling with my notes.

Yesterday, I spoke these words:

It did it. I would normally have to copy pasta them all one by one.

When I was writing a report I spoke:

It did this and changed the icon in the call-out to an ‘i’ emoji.

I find all of this amazing and it’s changing the way I use a computer.

No longer is a computer or an application a ‘technical’ thing where you use keywords to search for things or strict naming conventions. I don’t have to click icons in a certain order to get what I want.

I just say things in natural language and it happens.

This is also working for me outside of Evernote.

In ChatGPT I now say:

I would normally have to load my invoice software, click on invoices, click on invoice 3801, click add a payment, select bank transfer and save.

I now just say what I want and the AI does it.

I still create. I still think. In Evernote, the arranging of content in a note and formatting is now done quickly by AI without me having to fuss and fiddle.

I want to create. I don’t want to spend my time formatting and fiddling and fussing and organising. I want to create notes and content.

Just waiting for it to wash the car!

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Is AI changing the way you use a computer?

Are you using voice input with the AI Assistant or other tools? How do you find it? Let me know in the comments.

You can transcribe and regenerate transcriptions using the AI Assistant

A small update to the AI assistant this week.

You can now kick off a transcriptions and regenerate a transcription from the AI Assistant.

I’m not 100% sure if this is useful. It’s pretty easy and fast to hit the three-dot menu and bring up the regeneration screen.

Maybe the thinking is that you can build transcription instructions into a saved AI Prompt that runs the AI on older, non-transcribed files.

I’m pretty sure there’s some good use cases.

And finally...

The official July recap video has been released. These are always worth a watch.

And finally, finally…

Bending Spoons, the company the owns Evernote has had their first earnings call since their IPO.

The headline is:

I’ve put together a shared Evernote note which holds a summary of the earnings call, specific Evernote related information and a transcript of the whole call.

Thanks to the AI Assistant for summarising this.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon

I’ve spoken a fair bit about how recording and transcribing a meeting or call is just the beginning. The magic happens when you start working with the video.

In this weeks short mid-week video, I look at what you can do with an Evernote transcript once it has been created.

• Regenerate the transcript with speaker labels

• Rename each speaker throughout the conversation

• Transcribe a specific time range instead of the whole recording

• Change the transcription language

• Rename, download or edit the original audio or video

• Run saved AI Prompts against the transcript

• Create summaries in your preferred format

• Pull out action points or create social media posts

• Ask the AI Assistant questions about what each person said

• Collapse a long transcript when you do not need it on screen

In the demo, I used a copy of the most recent interview I did with fellow Evernote Certified Expert Stacey Harmon. If you have time, give it a listen.

I also mention the AI Prompt library a few times, check out the deep dive if you get chance.

Let me know how you use the transcripts in the comments.

Have a great rest of the week

All the best

Jon

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A huge thank you to all paid subscribers and many thanks also to those who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 11.28.2. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 11.27.3.

Lets get this quick one out of the way.

I have no idea if this is new or not, but as I only found it the other day, so I’m calling it new. It may have been around forever.

If you’re a tag user, one of the issues you’ll have at some point is having a bunch of orphaned tags, or tags not being used.

Here’s a quick way to find them.

Open the tag drawer by clicking Tags in the sidebar or using the keyboard shortcuts ⌥ + ⌘ + 7 for Mac and Ctrl + Alt + 7 or PCs. You can also remap these shortcuts to anything you want.

Click the sorting icon at the top right of the tag drawer and sort by Note count.

Click the arrows at the far right to charge the sort order and you’ll be able to see all the tags that are not being used.

This is useful if you’re a heavy tag user, so take a look at them from time to time and do some pruning.

Did you know about this? Do you use it? Let me know in the comments.

Mention notes, tags and notebooks in your saved AI prompts

If you missed the news from a few weeks ago Evernote has an AI Prompt library which means you can create pretty elaborate prompts, save them and reuse them as much as you want.

A little improvement has just arrived where you can now use the @ symbol to direct the prompt to use a specific note, tag or notebook.

A simple use case would be to add multiple tags to a note.

Another new thing added this week to the AI Assistant is the ability to create a new note and you can build this into the AI Prompt you’re creating.

Here’s an example where I’ve created a saved prompt to create a new note called Today with today’s date at the end of the title. I’ve then asked the AI Assistant to list my overdue and current tasks together with any notes tagged #flow in my .Inbox notebook. The flow tag is something I use a lot, they are notes created by my CRM and invoicing software, basically things I need to check or do.

The prompt in plain text if you want to try it out is:

Remember to use the @ symbol when creating the prompt to mention the correct notebook and tag.

Running this prompt with no note context creates a new note that looks like this:

The use cases for this new functionality are pretty much unlimited and a lot depends on your workflow, but being able to kind of automate little tasks and general note creation is going to be helpful.

Are you using the AI Prompt library? Let me know in the comments.

And finally...

The August private chat thread for paid subscribers is up and running, so feel free to ask questions, have a moan etc.

The general chat is also open for any free subscribers so hop along and say hello.

And finally, finally…

A new video is out on the official channel showing how to plan a holiday with some real use cases. Hopefully they’ll do some more of these types of videos.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon

On the back of last Friday’s article about AI Edit Mode, here’s a quick demo on how it works with a few examples.

In this quick midweek video, I’m going to walk you through what edit mode is and demo a few practical ways you can use it to speed up your Evernote workflows.

• Edit mode vs ask mode. What each one does and when to use them

• Turning selected text into a warning callout (with accept/reject edits)

• Converting text into an alphabetical bullet list

• A real-life workflow. Dropping names, emails and companies into the right table columns

• Using web search plus edit mode to pull in information, summarise it and add the content to the note.

Let me know in the comments if you’ve been using edit mode and what you think.

Have a great rest of the week

All the best

Jon

Subscribe now

A huge thank you to all paid subscribers and many thanks also to those who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 11.27.5. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 11.27.3.

A bit of a game changing update has arrived for the Evernote AI Assistant that will stop you having to copy and paste and manually edit notes quite so much.

Say hello to Edit Mode!

We can now use the AI Assistant to live edit our notes using natural language.

The content of your note automatically changes when edited.

Don’t panic! There’s an Undo button if it all goes horribly wrong.

You can switch into edit mode by clicking the plus button in the AI Assistant chat window and selecting Edit.

A little blue pen fountain pen icon will let you know edit mode is switched on.

From here, you can write what you want to edit in natural language and the AI Assistant will do it for you.

Let’s look at some examples.

Editing the title

Something simple to start with.

The title of this note I’m writing the article in is:

Evernote Adds Edit Mode to the AI Assistant

The prompt I’m using is:

It automatically changes the title of the note to:

Evernote update: AI Assistant now has Edit Mode (what it does and how to use it)

In the AI Assistant window it explains what its done and gives me a big Undo button in case I don’t like it.

I’m not a fan. I preferred the previous title, so I’ve hit Undo.

Editing a table

Let’s move onto something a bit more complicated. Styling a table.

I’ve created a sample table using the information from my reading list note. It’s a bit long, so I’ve just focused on Stephen King books. This is what it looks like.

The prompt I’ve used is:

It changed the styling and shows me the original table with the new table styling underneath.

I can accept and reject the changes.

If I accept, then the old style is removed, leaving the new style behind.

Editing text

Another example. I’m going to ask the AI Assistant to simplify a paragraph of text from last week’s article.

This is the text and I’ve selected it.

The prompt I’ve used is:

When the edits are done, I get the chance to accept/reject all lines of the paragrpah or accept/reject each line individually.

You can see the changes it made, go through them and approve whatever you want.

I like the way it does this. You don’t have to accept all the edits.

Creating a call-out

Lets turn some text into a call-out.

Here’s the text that I’ve selected.

The prompt I’ve used it:

When I run this prompt, I see the new call-out created with an Important emoji together with the old text above.

I accept the changes and see this.

Important things to note

Right now, this works on desktop apps only. Hopefully, a mobile version will arrive.

Even though Edit Mode automatically changes the content of the note, you always get chance to either accept/reject or undo changes.

Version history is updated during this editing process, so you can always go back to the previous version of a note.

OK, what do you think? I don’t usually get the AI Assistant to write for me, I can do that myself, but I think it will help with reformatting notes, especially from web clips or forwarded emails. You may want to rewrite things, the choice is yours.

Will you be using edit mode? Let me know in the comments.

And finally...

A new official Evernote video is out showing off a few of the 115 new features and improvements that have arrived over the first half of this year. Absolutely worth a watch.

That’s it

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon

Have you ever scribbled notes in a meeting or drawn tables on a bit of paper, then wished they were already typed up, or even neatly formatted as a table?

In this video I show you a simple Evernote AI workflow that turns handwriting and hand-drawn tables into clean note content.

The process doesn’t have to mean you keep the image, you can just upload it directly to the AI Assistant and convert it into text, then delete it.

This kind of means you can keep notes pretty tidy and not have random images of handwriting lurking around.

I like this. I’ve used it a few times now. Let me know if you transcribe much in the comments.

Have a great rest of the week

All the best

Jon

Subscribe now

A huge thank you to all paid subscribers and many thanks also to those who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 11.26.4. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 11.26.3.

The Evernote MCP server is out in public beta right now for folks on the starter and advanced plans. It’s coming soon to enterprise plans.

An MCP server is basically a way for you to connect your Evernote account to your favourite AI tool so you can work with your notes in the AI software itself.

I wrote about what an MCP is and how its useful a few weeks ago so have a read if you get chance.

Also check the AI section of Taming the Trunk for all AI related posts.

This article is not going to focus on what to use the MCP for, I’ll be writing more about that later. This concentrates on how to connect to the MCP.

First up are the instructions for ChatGPT, scroll down for the Claude instructions.

How to connect the Evernote MCP to ChatGPT

Connecting the Evernote MCP to ChatGPT is fairly straightforward, but you do need to check a few boxes along the way.

A few weeks ago, OpenAI released new versions of the ChatGPT web and desktop apps, so they are both very similar, this helps a lot.

All the screenshots below are from the web, it’s pretty much the same in the app.

The first thing you need to do is switch on developer mode so you can add the Evernote MCP.

Open up ChatGPT and go to Settings -> Plugins and then scroll down and click on Developer mode which is near the bottom.

Then scroll down and check the toggle that says Developer mode.

This lets you connect to third party MCP servers.

Next, click on Plugins in the sidebar and you should see a plus button towards the top right of the screen. Click this to add a new plugin.

This window appears.

You can ignore selecting an icon if you want, just give the plugin a name which would be Evernote and paste the following URL into the Connection box.

https://mcp.evernote.com/mcp

Don’t mess with anything else. Authentication should be OAuth, the connection toggle should be Server URL. Then all you need to do is check the disclaimer box at the bottom and click Create.

You should see a pop up similar to this asking yo to connect with Evernote.

Click Sign in with Evernote.

If you are not logged in you’ll see the usual Evernote login box.

Then you’ll be asked for some permissions.

Tick and untick what you want. If you don’t want the MCP to delete anything then uncheck this box. You can always revisit permissions later in the ChatGPT app.

Then check the disclaimer box at the bottom and click the Allow access button.

You’ll be redirected back to ChatGPT and away you go.

Try a quick prompt.

That’s it. A bit of a process, but it works.

This workflow is pretty much the same in the desktop ChatGPT apps.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments below. I use ChatGPT as my flavour of AI, so I should be able to help with questions.

How to connect the Evernote MCP to Claude AI

Here’s how to connect the Evernote MCP with Claude.

Just a note. I don’t use Claude as my daily AI, I’m a ChatGPT person, so I’ve signed up for the free plan to take a bunch of screen shots. Please let me know if anything is different in the paid plan regarding MCPs.

I used Claude web for all the screen shots, but it should be pretty much the same with the desktop apps, correct me if I’m wrong.

First step is to head into Settings -> Connectors and then from the Add dropdown menu at the top right of the screen select Add custom connector.

You’ll see this box.

Choose a name which would be Evernote and add this URL to the Remote MCP server URL box.

https://mcp.evernote.com/mcp

Don’t worry about the other boxes.

Next, click Add at the bottom right.

You’ll then see an option to connect with Evernote. Do this.

If you are not already logged into Evernote you will need to login.

After logging in, you then get to select the permissions you want to allow within Claude AI.

If you don’t want Claude to delete or create notes, then uncheck these boxes. Yu choose the scope of what the AI can do.

Permissions can be changed at any time within the Claude app.

Once you’re happy with the permissions, check the disclaimer box at the bottom and click the Allow access button.

You’ll be redirected back to Claude and you can go from there.

Try a quick prompt.

That’s it. Pretty simple.

Connect up and let me know how it goes. Leave a comment below.

Connecting Evernote MCP with other AI tools

You should be able to connect to the Evernote MCP with pretty much any AI tool but you will need to refer to your AI platforms documentation.

I know folk who have connected to Cursor and a few others, so give it a go and let me know what you connect and how you use it.

Also don’t forget to subscribe to Taming the Trunk as I’ll be writing a bunch of articles on what to use the MCP for.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon

Something new in this weeks short mid-week video.

Evernote now lets you add relative dates to notes using the @ command.

Type something in natural language such as @today, @tomorrow, @last Wednesday or even @Christmas Day and Evernote turns it into an interactive date.

The clever bit is that the wording changes as time moves on. Today becomes yesterday, then last Wednesday.

In this video, I show you how to add and edit relative dates, change the date format and switch the feature off if you prefer the old behaviour.

Relative dates work inside your note content, note titles and notes created from calendar events.

You will need version 11.26.4 or later of the Evernote desktop apps.

Do relative dates make more sense to you than fixed dates? Prefer the old school method? Let me know in the comments.

Have a great rest of the week

All the best

Jon

Subscribe now

A huge thank you to Rory, Mike and Marty who became paid subscribers over the last week and many thanks to those who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 11.25.6. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 11.25.6.

OK, let’s get this little change out of the way quickly.

A few weeks ago Evernote changed the colours in the text highlighter tool and a few folk found them a little bit too pastel, so with the new release this week we can now chose between the new colours and the old ones which are a bit brighter.

Head to Settings -> Notes, and you can select which ones you want to use.

I must admit my old man colour-blind eyes can’t really tell much difference between the two, but for those whose eyes still work, this may be helpful.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Working with file attachments in the Evernote AI Assistant

One of the slightly hidden features of the AI Assistant is the ability to attach files to a chat.

This is different to having the file in a note and there could be a few occasions where you want to work on a file but not have that file in the note itself.

When you open the AI Assistant, you can add a file or photo to the conversation by clicking the plus button and selecting Add photos & files.

I’ve been having a play to see what it can do.

Turning a handwritten chart into a Mermaid chart using Evernote AI

This was cool. I attached a photo of a crappy drawing of a simple flow chart and asked the AI Assistant to convert it into a Mermaid chart. The image itself doesn’t need to be kept, but it’s nice to have the chart.

The prompt I used was:

This was the response.

The Mermaid chart it produced looks like this.

This is pretty cool, converting my rubbish drawing. I like the way the AI can see the image.

This will be useful if I take photo’s of slides or whiteboards.

I wrote about creating charts and diagrams using Mermaid in Evernote a few weeks ago.

Crunching information inside a spreadsheet

A part of my day job is to run AI Marketing training sessions, so I have some sample spreadsheets setup that I use in lessons.

In this example, I’ve used some sample online store sales data.

I attached the spreadsheet and used the following prompt:

This was the response.

Pretty cool. Being able to upload CSV spreadsheets and analyse them is really useful, especially if they’re holding a lot of data.

You can also add multiple files to a chat, so it would be easy to ask the AI to run comparisons for you.

Note: This only works with CSV files and not Excel. You can export your Excel files as CSV before using them.

Pulling information out of a PDF document

In this example I’ve attached a PDF with all the GDPR rules. I really don’t want to read all this, but I want the rules regarding business to business email marketing.

This was the prompt:

This is part of the response (it was long):

If you have big PDFs that you want to summarise and create notes out of, attach them as a file and ask the AIA to create the note for you.

One thing to mention again is that you can add multiple files to the chat window so the assistant could bring together information from multiple places and combine it into a report or new note.

Another quick thing to mention is that you can also tell the AI Assistant to add the file you’ve attached to the note. Most of the time, it would be easier to drag the file in, but I’m sure there are use cases for this.

The examples above are very much work related and I think the AI Assistant works best when its analysing data or long text, maybe we don’t do that quite so much in our personal projects.

That said, I’ve used the assistant to compare yearly blood test results, work out backpacking itineraries and plan home projects.

Adding files to the chat window is useful, not as useful as adding them to the note but if they are files that you don’t need to keep in Evernote it’s another option for you.

Let me know if you’ve added files to chat in the comments. What was the reason? I love to hear about different workflows.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon

Evernote recently introduced inline tags, which means you can add tags right in the middle of your note simply by typing a #.

If you’ve ever ignored tags because they felt a bit hidden away at the bottom of the note, this feature might change that. I’ve been using tags a little bit more.

What the video covers

I walk you through how inline tags work and where they can be used, with a few practical examples.

• How to add an inline tag

• Inline tags still tag the note

• Removing the inline tag removes the note tag

• Where inline tags work

• Where they do not work

• How to turn it off

I also share a few ways you might use inline tags day to day, like marking a note as ready to edit, flagging actions that need doing, or quickly labelling a note as an invoice, bill, research, email, or anything else that fits your system.

Are you using inline tags? Let me know in the comments.

Have a great rest of the week

All the best

Jon

Subscribe now

A huge thank you to all paid subscribers and many thanks also to those who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 11.24.3. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 11.24.2.

A lot of folk have been waiting for this for a long time and it’s finally here! We now have access to the AI Assistant on mobile.

And it works pretty much the same as on desktop.

Make sure you’re using the latest version of the mobile app.

Just a quick note, this article is not about what to use the AI Assistant for, just how to operate the mobile version. I’ve written miles of text about what to use the AI for on Evernote and you can read them all in the AI section of Taming the Trunk.

How to open the Evernote AI Assistant on mobile

Open the app and you should see a new icon at the bottom of your screen.

Tap this and the AI Assistant will slide up from the bottom. It looks pretty much the same as it does on desktop.

At the top of this window, there’s the usual icon for seeing your chat history and an X to close the window.

At the bottom of the prompt window you’ll find the + button and behind that is Add photos & files, Search the web and Evernote help centre.

At the bottom right there’s a microphone for voice input, more later.

How to move the Evernote AI Assistant Icon

Now, a lot of you may have noticed that by default, you lose a navigation slot at the bottom of the screen. The AI Assistant has replaced one of them. Not so good.

A big shout out to Allan in the Taming the Trunk chat who spotted a setting under AI Features to customise where the AI Assistant icon is positioned.

Go to Settings -> AI Features -> Choose position.

You see these options.

The minimal navbar is default.

Compact navbar adds the AI Assistant to the right of the standard navigation bar and make it a little more compact.

The top right option sticks the icon at, surprisingly, the top right of the screen. I’ve gone for this as my default. I like it easy to get to but out of the way.

One thing I would love to see arrive is the chance to customise the icon. I much prefer using Mads the elephant on my desktop app.

Prompting the AI assistant by voice

I think this is probably more useful on mobile than desktop.

We all hate typing on mobile. It’s a pain and it’s much easier to speak into your phone.

The icon at the bottom right of the prompt window lets us dictate our prompt.

Disable the Evernote AI Assistant on mobile

If by any chance you don’t want to use the AI Assistant on mobile, you can disable it in settings.

Go to Settings -> AI Features and toggle off AI Assistant.

How to use Evernote AI Prompts on mobile

It’s a little bit hidden, but it is there. I would love to see an easier way to get to this on mobile.

One important thing to mention is that all the AI Prompts that you create on desktop automatically sync to mobile.

If you want to learn more about what AI Prompts are for, then check out last weeks article and this video.

So, there are two ways to get to AI Prompts. The first is to create a new note and then scroll the AI note suggestions to the far right, where you’ll find More AI Prompts.

The second way is to select some text in an existing note and then scroll to the far right of the AI Prompt menu, which looks the same as above.

When you tap on More AI Prompts you’ll see all your prompts in the library and you can search them.

You can then run a prompt against some selected text or within the new note. This works the same as on the desktop app, so check out the article and video mentioned above.

Now, when you select See all Prompts, you go to the entire AI Prompt library.

From here you can browse all your own custom prompts and the pre-installed ones from Evernote.

You can also create a new custom prompt by clicking the blue plus button.

Again, this works the same as on desktop, so check out the video mentioned earlier on how to create a custom prompt.

Improvements I would like to see

I would very much like a web search button next to the + and @ icons in the prompt box.

I’ve been testing the Evernote AI Assistant for a few weeks and use it almost as a search engine. It’s faster to open and easier to use than ChatGPT and if I want to make a note about what I’ve searched for, I can.

I would also love to see an easier way to get to the AI Prompts section. Maybe a diamond icon at the top of the chat window, similar to how it is on desktop.

What do you think? Have you used the AI Assistant on mobile yet? What improvements would you like to see? Let me know in the comments.

There’s an AI section of Taming the Trunk so make sure you head over and you can find lots of articles about how and what to use the AI Assistant and AI Prompts for.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon

The AI Assistant in Evernote just got a whole lot more useful.

A bit longer than the usual mid-week videos as it’s a big feature… sorry!

I’m going to walk you through Evernote’s AI Prompt Library and show you how it can change the way you use the AI Assistant. If you’ve ever wanted the assistant to format things in your voice, pull the right info, or run your own reusable workflows, this is the feature you’ve been waiting for.

In the video:

• Where to find the AI Prompt Library (and the two quickest ways to open it)

• What the pre-installed prompts are good for

• How to create a custom prompt from scratch

• How to run a prompt on selected text and an entire note

• How to run a prompt with no note context at all

• How to run a prompt against a recording or transcript, including making your own meeting summary format

Let me know if you’re using AI prompts in the comments and what you’re using it for.

Have a great rest of the week

All the best

Jon

Subscribe now

A huge thank you to all paid subscribers and many thanks also to Sven, who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 11.23.2. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 11.23.2.

A couple of weeks ago AI Prompts dropped as a new feature in Evernote and I’ve been hanging on for everyone to get this before doing the deep dive.

I think this is a bit of a game changer for the AI Assistant.

What are Evernote AI Prompts

It’s basically a library where you can save prompts that you use all the time.

It saves you typing them in over and over again.

It’s also somewhere you can start building workflows using the AI Assistant.

The easiest way to get to the AI Prompts is to click the little diamond-ish icon at the top of the AI Assistant window. There are other ways to get to it and we’ll cover them later.

AI Prompts is where you can search your prompts, run them against a note, or just run them, they don’t have to be dependent on a note.

Existing pre-installed prompts

Your newly minted AI Prompt Library comes with a whole bunch of pre-installed prompts.

You can’t edit these, but they are there if you need them.

They cover researching, planning, daily briefs and general rewriting of content.

There’s also a category designed to work with the transcriptions that you create, this section is very useful.

To give you an idea here’s the pre-installed prompt for pulling key items out of a meeting transcription.

These pre-installed prompts are really helpful but sometimes you may want a response in a specific style or format and this is where you can create your own custom prompts.

Tip: Copying the text of a pre-installed prompt is a great starting point for your own custom prompt.

Creating a custom AI prompt in the library

Open AI Prompts and click the Create button toward the top left and this screen appears.

You can also create a new prompt by going to the three-dot menu by the new note button in the left sidebar.

To create your custom prompt, select an emoji icon, a title for your prompt, a description and then you can put the prompt into a category.

Right now, we have categories for:

• General

• New note ideas

• Text edit

• Meeting Summary

• Transcription follow ups

At the bottom of the prompt creation window, you’ll find a place to put your instructions. This is the prompt that you want to run.

It’s important to be specific. To tell the AI exactly what you want, in what format and in the voice and tone you want.

All AI prompts work better when you‘re absolutely specific with the instructions.

I created the eBUILDE Evernote prompting framework to help you get the most out of your prompts.

One of the custom prompts in my library is for creating YouTube video descriptions based on the transcription of the videos I create for Taming the Trunk.

I also have a simpler prompt for telling me ‘what’s happening today’.

Experiment. You can edit and update a custom prompt at any time, so if you find you’re not getting exactly what you want, go into the AI Prompts library and edit your prompt to be even more specific to what you need.

Finding your custom prompts quickly

There’s a couple of ways to filter out your custom prompts.

The first is to click the Created by me button and this gets rid of all the pre-installed prompts and shows your own creations.

You can also hover over a prompt card and click the pin icon at the top right. You’ll pin the prompt to the top of the category.

Running a prompt against a note

There’s a couple of ways to do this.

The first way is to open the AI Assistant and go to the diamond icon and open AI Prompts.

Then click on the prompt you want to use and a window like this appears.

Click Try AI Prompt and a box appears with all your notes in it, most recent at the top.

If the note you want doesn’t appear, search for it and click it.

The prompt will run in the AI Assistant window.

The other way to run a prompt is to select some text in a note and run the prompt from the new floating formatting bar which I recorded a short video on the other day.

You can then search for the prompt you want and run it against the selected text.

This is really useful for editing text or simplifying a sentence.

Running a prompt on its own - no note

Now this is interesting. You can run a prompt on its own, not referring directly to note content and this opens up a different way to use the AI Assistant.

A good example of this is my ‘whats happening today’ prompt that tells me what I have to do today.

When I run this, I go to AI Prompts from the diamond icon at the top of the AI Assistant window, click on the prompt and then instead of clicking on a note I click on Try without note context.

It then runs the prompt in the AI Assistant window and tells me what’s happening today.

Ideas for reusable prompts

The whole idea of this library is that you can store prompts and use them as much as you want without the typing.

Here’s a few ideas for custom prompts:

• Rewrite text, but in your specific voice and tone - based on note content.

• Write social media posts based on note content in your voice and tone.

• List all the notes created today/yesterday - run without note context

• A meeting transcription summary how you want it. Here’s my master meeting prompt - based on note content.

• A daily briefing in exactly the format you want - run without note context.

Each one of us will probably have specific use cases for the prompts we create, so have a play and remember if you don’t get exactly what you want from the AI, go back and edit the prompt.

Will you be using AI Prompts? What kinds of prompts will you be creating? Let me know in the comments.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon

Do you want to get ideas out of your head and into Evernote faster?

In this little mid-week video I’m demoing Evernote’s new dictation feature, how it differs from a normal voice note and how to start using it in seconds.

What you’ll see:

• How dictation works across devices (PC, Mac, iPhone and Android)

• The quickest way to start dictation using the /dictation slash command

• Where to find it in the Insert menu if you prefer clicking

• What the dictation block looks like and how it behaves while you speak

• How Evernote adds punctuation and line breaks automatically

• A quick look at switching languages while dictating

The quality of the dictation is generally very good. On the improvement side, I would like to be able to dictate checklists and bullet lists, that would be useful.

If you give it a try, let me know how you get on. Leave me a comment below

Have a great rest of the week

All the best

Jon

Subscribe now

A huge thank you to Len, Harry and Hal who all became paid subscribers over the last week and many thanks to those who bought me a coffee. Taming the Trunk is 100% reader supported, no ads or commission links and your support is really appreciated.

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 11.21.5. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 11.21.4.

A couple of months ago Evernote announced they were working on an MCP Server and invited folks to sign up to a wait list.

That wait is over and folks who filled in the form should’ve had an email telling them how to test out this new feature.

It’s going to be a bit of a game changer for a lot of people.

This article is meant to be more of an introduction than a how to. Things may change before it’s released to everyone, so I’ll do one of my deep dives demoing how to connect it all up once it’s fully released.

What is an MCP

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol and its a standard that allows any AI tool like ChatGPT, Claude etc to connect to your Evernote account and retrieve/add/edit notes.

It’s a bit like a fancy API.

It doesn’t matter what AI service you use, just connect to the Evernote MCP and get access directly to everything in your Evernote account inside the AI tool.

This is what the connection looks like in ChatGPT.

With this connection live I can ask ChatGPT to perform all sorts of different actions on my Evernote account.

When you connect things up for the first time, you can choose to allow certain actions like adding/editing/deleting.

For example, you could only allow read only permissions so that the AI can only retrieve information and not add/edit or delete it.

This is what the permissions window looks like when connecting.

Once its all connected you’ll be able to prompt your AI with phrases like “Save this information to Evernote” and it will create a new note with whatever info you’ve been getting from the AI.

What can you do with the Evernote MCP?

Lots of things.

I’ve had it connected for around a month now and have used it quite a few times to either save information to Evernote or work with Evernote data inside my AI.

My AI of choice is Codex for Work which is made by OpenAI, its very similar to Claude Co-work.

The other day, I asked it to do some research for me on how to create some call-outs using Apple Pages, plus another bunch of formatting information. I told it to save the information to Evernote.

It didn’t really take almost 3 minutes to do this, it was my fault not paying attention and approving write permission for the first time it tried to create a note.

So, the AI did some research, collated it and formatted it how I wanted and then saved it into Evernote.

If I’m honest this kind of research could easily be done using the Evernote AI Assistant with a web search. You’d get pretty much the same results and it may be easier. It depends on how you work.

It all gets a lot more exciting and much more powerful when you start adding all your other apps to your AI service. It’s like connecting them all together.

Right now along with Evernote’s MCP, I’ve added my invoicing and CRM apps, cloud storage, social media app, project management software, Slack and my email.

I can now work with all of them in Codex and bring information from many places together.

Here’s something I did earlier.

I asked the AI to go to my invoice app and get all the paid invoices from May, add them up and store the results in an Evernote note.

I now have a paid invoices report for May. If I wanted to, I could specify the notebook I want it to be saved into. If you don’t it goes into the default notebook.

I’m not a big fan of social media, so I tend to get Codex or Evernote’s AI Assistant to write posts for me. I’ve created a specific skill in Codex with the Taming the Trunk brand voice and tone, which is basically how I sound.

This prompt goes to Evernote and looks at the Copy for 2027 calendar template note and then creates some social posts based on the social skills I’ve taught it.

Final example is a skill that I’ve taught Codex for renaming and processing all my receipts.

Every now and then, I’ll be asking it to look at my Receipts Dump notebook, rename the note titles based on who this invoice is from, what its for and when it is. I then tell it to move the note to my Receipts 2026 notebook.

I’m really lazy at processing my receipts manually, so teaching Codex this skill will save me hours of work. There were 175 notes in my Receipts Dump notebook... not any more!

I invoked the Evernote Rename Receipts skill that I created and it processed 147 of the notes.

The 23 left over were because I told it to ignore notes where it couldn’t work out what it was for.

This is huge. Manually renaming so many notes and moving them takes me ages. I just ask my robot to do it now.

So, there we go. These are some of the ways I’m using the Evernote MCP. Others will do different things with it.

If you’ve got access to it, let me know what you’re up to and what you think.

If you haven’t, either hang on a little longer for the public rollout or fill in the waitlist form and see if they are still taking entries.

And finally…

Bending Spoons have published a fascinating blog post explaining how they created the technology for semantic search.

It throws out a lot of stats like 9 billion notes, 5.7K notes processed per second.

If you want to go super technical and find out how they did it, then check out the article here.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon