The note-taking app that once defined its category is receiving its first major update since being acquired by a company that many of its users had never heard of at the time.
Evernote’s V11 release, announced Monday, follows two years of fairly intense iterative work by its new corporate parent, Bending Spoons, and infuses AI deeper into the app’s search and transcription features. These new tools will come to Evernote’s desktop and web apps first, then its mobile versions.
“With V11, we’re trying to move one step closer to realizing our long-term mission of creating an intuitive and personalized platform that customers can use as their second brain,” says product lead Federico Simionato.
I have used Evernote since 2010–not always to my satisfaction–and have been paying for one premium tier or another since 2014, so I had to use that service for this conversation. I took notes in Evernote’s Mac client while recording it in its Android app for later AI transcription. That usage scenario would have guaranteed a sync conflict a few years ago, but the service’s cloud synchronization ably fielded it this time.
While many other attempts to put AI to work in text-based apps have started with having it do the writing for humans, Evernote’s new AI assistant–developed with OpenAI–emphasizes making more sense of your existing notes.
“We combine the powerful search functionalities of Evernote with OpenAI’s SDK to easily surface random content through a conversational chat,” Simionato says.
Evernote’s AI assistant locating useful content for an upcoming trip to Barcelona. (Credit: Evernote)
Simionato demonstrated that by typing searches into the AI assistant’s chat window for help with a trip to Barcelona, and the assistant recognized that a note recounting a visit to Parc Guell was relevant to that query.
He then typed follow-on questions into the chat window to get details like the confirmation number for the flight, and showed how you can launch a web search to see if he should adjust anything in those plans. The assistant did not warn of any impending transit strikes, something I have learned to watch out for over years of covering MWC there.
Evernote’s AI assistant can also summarize notes and compile them into new notes. But when Simionato asked the agent to put together a three-day itinerary for that trip, it presented the same suggestions for day one’s morning, lunch, afternoon, and evening.
Evernote had opted not to lead with AI writing because customers weren’t asking for it. “We haven’t been as focused on text generation,” Simionato says. “We tried to follow a bottom-up approach where we just asked people and we built what people needed rather than trying to develop something and see if it sticks.”
V11 also upgrades Evernote’s existing search function to “semantic search,” which is another way to say that you don’t need to include an exact keyword to have this surface relevant notes.
Evernote’s AI transcriber can now distinguish between speakers. (Credit: Evernote)
And it brings a significant upgrade to the AI Transcribe feature. That’s already seen considerable improvements since its debut in 2024, advancing from returning lengthy and unbroken blocks of text to automatically adding boldface headings and bulleted and numbered lists.
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Other AI note-taking services already do that, and the lack of that feature in the current software made its transcripts harder to read. It also heard “Parc Guell” as “park well,” which could indicate insufficient familiarity with Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí’s work or just mean the software got confused by Simionato’s accent.
As before, the transcription feature is limited to recordings of one hour at most, with transcription done in the cloud after you request it.
Evernote, which roughly doubled its rates at the end of 2023, remains considerably more expensive than other note-taking apps: a Personal plan with 10GB a month of uploads costs $129.99 a year, which breaks down to $10.83 per month, while a Professional plan that doubles the upload quota and includes Adobe Acrobat Standard runs $169.99 a year, equating to $14.16 a month. The service does still offer a free version, but since the end of 2023, it’s been limited to one notebook with 50 notes.
Evernote’s pricing is not particularly competitive, especially compared with free options like Apple Notes or Google Keep, but also Microsoft’s OneNote, included with the Microsoft 365 cloud service, which can be a borderline mandatory expense for many tech users. But those apps have issues of their own; Apple Notes, for example, has no Windows or Android clients, Google Keep has no Mac or Windows desktop apps, and OneNote dropped its Evernote-migration tool in September 2022.
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Simionato says Evernote is holding its rates constant for V11 but is “considering” changing them to make a clearer distinction between its two plans. One major form of customer feedback was that “personal and professional tiers are too close.”
He didn’t offer a breakdown between personal and pro plans, but did say that Evernote had found a sustainable niche in the market. “Customer retention on Evernote has never been higher,” he says. “It’s a very healthy business now.”
Few people would’ve said that in January 2023, when Bending Spoons bought Evernote at an unannounced price. The service had seen years of neglect interspersed with pledges to improve it, and the acquisition of a Silicon Valley startup by a company in Milan did not land well with many longtime users.
“People rightly, understandably got confused about it,” Simionato says. “Usually when you see your favorite product in the world, it’s either neutral or bad news; it’s rarely good news.”
Bending Spoons has since embarked on a minor buying spree, acquiring other web services and apps, including the file-sending tool WeTransfer, the former WeWork subsidiary Meetup, and the video-recording and streaming service Streamyard. These deals have been followed by large-scale layoffs and moves of operations to EU offices. In September, it announced a deal to buy the streaming-video platform Vimeo for $1.38 billion.
Simionato did not voice any WeWork-scale ambitions for Evernote, which is probably a good thing considering how that grotesquely overvalued startup imploded. “We’re not trying to capture, like, hundreds of millions of free users,” he says. “We are very happy to serve a few million…customers.”
Editors’ note: We updated this post with details of Evernote’s feature-rollout plan and more context about its corporate parent.
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Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.
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