Evernote Daily Note Taking & Audio Transcription Coming Soon

Newsletter housekeeping: Hello to all the new subscribers who joined recently! Thanks for joining the herd. Remember, as a free subscriber, you can join the subscriber-chat, so pop in and say hello. The latest Mac & PC version is 10.93.2 available on the download page. The latest phone phones is10.93.0 which brings some extra customisation for the bottom bar.

Last week we had three new features in the style of pinned notes in notebooks, '@' internal linking and new mobile home page customisation. This week I can tell you about daily notes, audio transcriptions and one very useful little improvement.

Daily Journal/To Do Notes

I think I'm going to like this, not sure yet, I think I am!

It’s not rolled out yet so you're going to have to wait a little while before you see it but not long.

When you activate Daily Notes a new 'Daily Notes' notebook is automatically created and every day a brand-new note will be automatically created in said notebook from a template.

The new note is triggered when you open the app for the first time each day.

The note will have the days date in the title and be created from a template.

Right now, there are three fixed templates to choose from. I'm hoping that if the feature proves popular then they’ll build the main template gallery into this feature so we can design and pick our own template.

One workaround for a custom template would be to create something in your template gallery and when a new daily note is created go CTRL+A to select all, hit delete and then add the custom template from your gallery. Should only take a few seconds.

There's also a bunch a new preferences in the settings menu which look a little like this.

You need to opt into this new feature so there are no worries that Evernote are going to start creating notes for you on the fly. You can switch it on or off in the settings and change the template.

As I mentioned earlier, I think I might use this.

My setup when at work is two monitors where I have Evernote web on the right monitor with my tasks loaded up and the normal Windows app on my left screen.

I also have a notebook on my desk where I write the most important goals of the day.

What I may try is to open the daily note in a new window and pin it to the right of my second monitor and have Evernote web pinned to the left of the same monitor, kind of split screen.

I'll be able to see my main goals of the day and tasks on one screen which will be useful and I might be able to remove the paper notebook and make some room on my desk. Let’s see how it goes for a while.

Will you use this feature? Maybe for a journal or daily plan? Let me know in the comments.

Audio transcription

Also coming soon, its being tested out right now, is an audio transcription feature.

The plan is for you to be able to take voice notes on your phone or PC/Mac app and have them transcribed into text.

I've been testing it for a couple of days now and the quality of the transcription is excellent, not many errors at all even with my Black Country accent. Bostin!

Check this little video out of it in action.

The transcription also works for MP4 video files.

Hit that transcribe button and you'll get a little spinning wheel. This 6MB video took less than 10 seconds to transcribe.

The results were excellent, pretty much word perfect and I really like that the transcription appears in Evernotes new quote format.

Let’s talk limits. Right now, its 25MB so if your video or audio file is larger than this it won't transcribe.

For an MP3 file recorded at 128kbps you can look at 25MB being approximately 25 minutes so if you're recording a meeting or lecture you may want to start the recorder every 20ish minutes.

I'd like to see this increased at some point as meetings can sometimes go on a bit.

I'd also like to see speaker identification bought in so that we can identify who's said what when we review notes at a later date.

But, even right now it works great. I take a few voice notes and being able to transcribe them will be great.

Will use audio transcriptions? Let me know in the comments

A small improvement to slash and at commands

Slash commands have been around a while now and the new '@' internal linking feature has gone down a storm, a lot of folk seem to love it and if you're running version 10.93.1 onwards there's a little improvement.

Before when you hit a / or an @ but didn't want to use the command then it was a little bit of a pain to dismiss the pop up. Now if you hit ESC the slash/at pop up goes away.

A very small but very useful improvement.

Quick bonus video

Fellow Evernote Certified Expert Vlad Campos has a very cool new video out demoing some of the new features in Evernote including pinned notes so give this a quick watch and give his channel a sub.

Don't forget to let me know what you think about all these new shiny things in the comments.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon