The Importance of Voice for Evernote

[Paul A. 480]

Four months ago, a blog post with the above subject was posted to the Evernote tech blog.

This blog post describes hiring an individual who wrote an app that performs automatic voice transcription, and Evernote's plans to incorporate this technology into Evernote. As described in the article, the potential reads like something out of a science fiction:

Quote

We are excited by the potential for bringing ideas from Cassette into Evernote. For example, imagine starting a recording in Evernote when you walk into a meeting and letting it run in the background. During the meeting, Evernote would transcribe everything in the background, distinguishing between different voices, and pulling out highlights and action items on its own.

The blog post ends with:

Quote

At Evernote, we have a solid team that combines voice expertise, user experience, and creative product developers, and will help us make this vision a reality. In the coming months, we’ll be releasing new technologies and experiences that will delight our users and help them organize everything—and we know that this is just the beginning.

In the intervening four months, have there been any more discussions, announcements, or event hints about voice-related features along these lines? The capabilities described in this post would be groundbreaking and I can't wait to try them out. If anyone from Evernote is reading, I volunteer to be a beta tester!  

[gazumped 10,331]

Hmmn.  Four months ago they blogged about bringing a voice expert on board and were "excited by the potential for bringing ideas from Cassette into Evernote" (Cassette was his previous company).  I think it's a bit early to look for a beta version of anything as ambitious as parsing a room full of chatter - and Evernote aren't about to show their hand,  any more than any car company is going to show off next year's models before the launch. 

They don't (usually) comment on future developments anyway.  I'd suggest you sign up for the beta version for your preferred device OS and wait for releases...

[jefito 5,586]

11 hours ago, Paul A. said:

Four months ago, a blog post with the above subject was posted to the Evernote tech blog.

The link here is incorrect; it just points at this forum topic. @gazumped has the right one.

11 hours ago, Paul A. said:

In the intervening four months, have there been any more discussions, announcements, or event hints about voice-related features along these lines?

I'm sure that behind the scenes there have been many discussions. You'll need to wait until they actually announce something (beta, product, etc.); I'm sure that they won't be silent about it once they have something to actually show. One thing to keep in mind: Cassette is an iOS only application, so far as I can tell (they claim that an Android version is in the works), but Evernote is a multi-platform, multi-language product. It will likely take some time to integrate into all of the Evernote products. It's also possible that they'd roll out iOS (or whatever) first, but I'd guess that there's some infrastructure work that might need to be done to make the Evernote service support voice-related content. Another thing; they brought in an engineer, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they brought in Cassette's technology.

[Paul A. 480]

3 hours ago, gazumped said:

Hmmn.  Four months ago they blogged about bringing a voice expert on board and were "excited by the potential for bringing ideas from Cassette into Evernote" (Cassette was his previous company).  I think it's a bit early to look for a beta version of anything as ambitious as parsing a room full of chatter - and Evernote aren't about to show their hand,  any more than any car company is going to show off next year's models before the launch. 

They don't (usually) comment on future developments anyway.  I'd suggest you sign up for the beta version for your preferred device OS and wait for releases...

According to LinkedIn, the individual was brought on board to Evernote as of September 2017. I wouldn't expect v.1.0 to be nirvana, but it would be nice to start seeing some more advanced voice recording features start to get rolled out. I realize these things take time and I'm just champing at the bit.  Just wanted to get a little awareness and discussion going as I think this could be the biggest and most impactful feature Evernote rolls out in 2018.

2 hours ago, jefito said:

The link here is incorrect; it just points at this forum topic. @gazumped has the right one.

I'm sure that behind the scenes there have been many discussions. You'll need to wait until they actually announce something (beta, product, etc.); I'm sure that they won't be silent about it once they have something to actually show. One thing to keep in mind: Cassette is an iOS only application, so far as I can tell (they claim that an Android version is in the works), but Evernote is a multi-platform, multi-language product. It will likely take some time to integrate into all of the Evernote products. It's also possible that they'd roll out iOS (or whatever) first, but I'd guess that there's some infrastructure work that might need to be done to make the Evernote service support voice-related content. Another thing; they brought in an engineer, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they brought in Cassette's technology.

Thanks for pointing that out - I've updated the link above.

I agree, the need to be cross-platform probably adds significant challenges. I also agree it's also possible that the Cassette codebase didn't go to Evernote - the product manager's LinkedIn said he joined Evernote as part of Cassette's "exit," which implies it may have been purchased by Evernote, but is vague enough that it's possible that it was not. Even if it was purchased by Evernote, Evernote seems committed to working in the Google Cloud, so if Cassette didn't leverage the Google Cloud there might need to significant re-work of the back-end.

Anyway, I'm very excited about this technology and looking forward to seeing what Evernote does with it.

[Paul A. 480]

I figured I would bump this thread. Has there been any more news on Evernote's plans for voice?