If you're like me, it's probably been a hot minute since you've thought about Evernote. For years, the note-taking app, once a darling of the App Store, faced declining popularity and profitability. The last time it grabbed headlines was in 2022 when it was sold to Milan-based developer Bending Spoons. Approximately nine months later, Bending Spoons laid off nearly all of Evernote's US workforce, and relocated what remained of the company's operations to Europe. Now, Evernote wants to be in the conversation again.
Since taking over the app, Bending Spoons has released more than 200 improvements, culminating today with the release of Evernote v11. The company is touting the update, which is the first major release for Evernote since its poorly received v10 release back in 2020. The new version brings a handful of new AI features to Evernote, including one that Bending Spoons collaborated with OpenAI to develop.
"My wish for v11 is that people give it a try and see how fast and reliable it is, how complete it is in what it offers," Federico Simionato, Evenote's product lead, said over a video chat. "I think people have an outdated opinion of Evernote that used to match reality, when Evernote was slow and unreliable."
The first of the new features Bending Spoons is introducing today is called AI Assistant. Simionato describes it as having ChatGPT inside of Evernote. No surprise since the company collaborated with OpenAI to make it. As you can probably guess, you can use AI Assistant to search through your notes and notebooks, but the tool's utility goes beyond that. It allows you to interact with your documents and ask follow-up questions. AI Assistant can also generate new content, and you can decide how what it creates is integrated within your existing notes and notebooks. In my demo, Simionato used AI Assistant to add a flight ticket number to a note he had dedicated to an upcoming trip to Spain. Over time, Bending Spoons plans to make AI Assistant more powerful, with the company working on making it possible for the chatbot to assign tags to notes and perform bulk actions across multiple documents, among other capabilities.
By default, Bending Spoons will enable AI Assistant for all paid users. A set of granular controls will allow people to decide what content AI Assistant can access. The agreement Bending Spoons has with OpenAI means the company can't train its models on data from Evernote users. Additionally, any data sent to the cloud for processing will only be held as long it takes to complete the user's request.
Part of the reason Bending Spoons is taking a more forward approach with AI Assistant is due to user feedback. In 2023, the company released a tool called AI Search. Simionato says his team was "extremely careful" to add friction to the experience to ensure people felt Evernote was respecting their privacy. To that end, you had to dig into the app's settings to enable AI Search before it would work. According to Simionato, most people found that setup was "too cumbersome," and with most people becoming more comfortable with AI tools, the company decided to make AI Assistant visible from the jump.
The other new feature Bending Spoons is introducing today is one some Evernote users have been waiting for a decade: Semantic Search. Instead of trying to find a note using an exact word or phrase you used inside of it, Semantic Search allows Evernote to filter through your documents using context. Simionato demonstrates the feature in action by typing "Barcelona trip" into the new interface, and Evernote surfaces a note he created about a trip to Girona. If you're not familiar, Girona is a city about 62 miles northeast of Barcelona and part of Catalonia. The document Evernote pulled up had no mention of Barcelona in it, but that didn't prevent the tool from finding it. According to Simionato, this is the most requested feature of longtime Evernote users and one Bending Spoons is happy it can finally deliver on.
Lastly, the company has expanded the app's built-in recording and transcription capabilities. Building on AI Transcribe, which Bending Spoons first introduced in 2024, Evernote can now record audio from both in-person and online meetings and automatically transcribe and summarize what's said. This feature should work in every language that Evernote currently supports.
As mentioned, Evernote's new AI features are available to all paid users. Simionato said Bending Spoons is working on making a trail available to free users sometime in the next few months. For now, the price of Evernote's paid plans isn't going up, but Simionato noted the company plans to adjust pricing in the coming months, mostly to account for the fact there aren't many notable differences between the Personal and Professional tiers.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/evernotes-biggest-update-since-2020-goes-all-in-on-ai-180000340.html?src=rss
