One Week in with Evernote's Ai Powered Search

We’re around one week into Evernote launching the new Ai Powered Search so I thought I’d share how I’ve been using it over the last week and what changes I’ve been making to my note taking and organisation.

If you missed it, make sure you check out the podcast interview I recorded the other day with Evernote’s product lead Federico. Lots of great insight there.

Quick note. It’s a shortish one this week as I’m suffering with COVID and can’t really see the screen. There may be typos and the contents of my fever-dreams!

Have you been using it much? I have and its almost part of my normal routine for finding answers to things. I didn't think I would use it as much as I do but I’m finding it really useful.

One thing I have found out is that our notes need to be descriptive so the Ai knows what we’re talking about. Like a lot of folk, I use my own shorthand, abbreviations and lots of typos when I take notes and store information and the Ai has no idea what this means. I think we’ll need to explain ourselves better, take better notes.

I’d describe travelling to London in a different way to you, using different words and phrases.

We need to use these words and phrases when we ask questions so the Ai finds the right stuff.

I asked the Ai search when I last had tyres fitted to my car and it had no idea even though the receipt is in my ‘Car’ notebook. When I dug into this a little more, I found that the word ‘tyre’ doesn’t appear anywhere in the note or on the receipt, it’s just a part number.

I know that ‘195/50x16’ is a tyre but the Ai doesn’t.

Now when I changed the note title to include ‘Car tyres’ and asked the question in a slightly different way I got the right answer.

I need to check all my localisation settings as I should be getting dates in UK format. A job for later.

I ran the bi-weekly backup of my CRM this morning and like I always do, threw the zip file into Evernote. I asked it when I last made a backup. I did this within a couple of minutes of adding the file as I wanted to know how quickly the Ai reacted to note changes.

It got it right, first time, apart from the upside-down date format!

The other day I got asked what the note limit was for Evernote, I was pretty sure I knew but I thought I’d double check and I have a note containing all Evernote’s system limitations.

It did quite a nice job of summarising the answer.

One more. I use some software called Codeigniter when I build the odd web application and one of the libraries deals with all the user login/password/authorisation stuff so I asked it how I update user details.

It did a pretty good job of explaining what I needed to do based on the content of the manual which is a note, a really big note, over 8000 words.

Changing organisation structure because of Ai Search

I joined Vlad Campos on his YouTube channel the other day (not live yet) to talk about Ai things, it was probably the 2nd worst day of COVID fever so I have no idea what I said, I may have broken into song at some point, not a clue! Anyway, I remember Vlad asking me if I was thinking of changing the way I organise things, maybe losing some of the organisation because the Ai can find answers quickly.

I hadn’t thought of this. I’m absolutely changing the way I take notes where I’m being much more descriptive but I’m not sure I’m ready for organisation changes yet. I like my notebooks and my structure.

But Vlad has a good point, in the future when the Ai is better, maybe we won’t need a structured organisation system, maybe everything gets thrown into a bit pot and we ask the software for an answer or ask it to filter things in natural language.

So, one positive to come from all of this is we may never need to use tags again😂

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon