Can someone please tell me what the new EN AI "Cleanup feature" will be doing to our Notes?

[scottr99 5]

Thank you,

Scott

[gazumped 11,666]

Hi.  While I'm sure someone appreciates your enthusiasm and excitement,  that feature hasn't been released yet.  Other than what's covered by  https://evernote.com/blog/evernote-pricing-upcoming-features-update/ we (mainly users-based feedback here) have no idea..

[agsteele 2,950]

I've seen a demo. It looks very clever. It remains to be seen just how clever it is.

What we do know is that it will not be automatic. So if you don't start the process the AI will not touch your content. Also, when you run the AI you get a warning, explanation of what is about to happen to your data and the option to opt out. You can accept that warning so that it doesn't pop up every time or leave it as an extra check in the process.

[s2sailor 2,199]

6 hours ago, agsteele said:

What we do know is that it will not be automatic. So if you don't start the process the AI will not touch your content. Also, when you run the AI you get a warning, explanation of what is about to happen to your data and the option to opt out.

If you don't like what it has done, can you control/command Z back?

[agsteele 2,950]

Yes. Undo is an option.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,959]

Thanks, @agsteele. Can you share anything about what exactly it "cleans up"? I realize there may be an NDA involved for beta demos, but I share @scottr99's curiosity.

[gazumped 11,666]

I'd think you can get a fair idea by creating a test note and asking ChatGPT to summarise it.  Say something like:

"I'm going to provide you with a long document. Please summarise it for me"... and hit enter,  then copy/ paste the document and hit enter again.

The result,  IME,  can be variable - used that way the app speaks perfect english,  and that does not shorten sentences very well!  I can usually shorten the output by another 30%

I understand there are more feature - tasks,  delegations and such;  but we'll have to wait to see precisely what it can do.  My takeawyas here would be:

1. work on a copy note
2. you don't have ro use the extension
3. it's not destructive - you can reverse changes,  and there's always Note History.

As always I'm busy with some darn alligators - don't currently have time to worry whether we're going to drain the swamp...

[s2sailor 2,199]

8 minutes ago, gazumped said:

don't currently have time to worry whether we're going to drain the swamp...

Not worried, just curious to see what they come up with, and as long as there is an undo, I'll give it a whirl.

[agsteele 2,950]

1 hour ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

Thanks, @agsteele. Can you share anything about what exactly it "cleans up"? I realize there may be an NDA involved for beta demos, but I share @scottr99's curiosity.

I think you can imagine what it might offer.  Imagine you taken hurried notes for a meeting or project that you're working on. Ask the AI to cleanup and it will do the pretty standard stuff to display a choerent and well laid out note. That sort of thing. I think it will be easier to see and try out rather than describe.

[laurence.glazier 104]

An issue for me is that I don't want fragments of confidential meeting notes to turn up in someone else's GPT session. I suppose we will all find out soon.

[Jon/t 1,289]

16 minutes ago, laurence.glazier said:

An issue for me is that I don't want fragments of confidential meeting notes to turn up in someone else's GPT session. I suppose we will all find out soon.

Same here and I asked this exact question.  The data sent to the AI won't be used to train it. Any data sent to the AI be just be used for the purpose of the clean up and not retained to train future models. 

[scottr99 5]

Thanks everyone for your contribution to this thread. My only fear was/is it automatically cleaning up tables. I have a Literature Review Matrix with over 2000 cells populated that I don't want touched in any way. It's well over a month's work, working 10-12 hour days on it.

[gazumped 11,666]

14 minutes ago, scottr99 said:

I have a Literature Review Matrix with over 2000 cells populated that I don't want touched in any way.

Sounds like the best protection would be a backup to spreadsheet unless you already have it in an external file.  As you've heard any AI involvement at all should be optional,  and you'd still have the protection of Note History if anything was changed.

[scottr99 5]

5 minutes ago, gazumped said:

Sounds like the best protection would be a backup to spreadsheet unless you already have it in an external file.  As you've heard any AI involvement at all should be optional,  and you'd still have the protection of Note History if anything was changed.

Thanks and yes I am backing up, but using EN for my backups (I really don't wish to employ Excel for that purpose). Yes it sounds like I'll be fine.

[agsteele 2,950]

1 hour ago, scottr99 said:

Thanks everyone for your contribution to this thread. My only fear was/is it automatically cleaning up tables. I have a Literature Review Matrix with over 2000 cells populated that I don't want touched in any way. It's well over a month's work, working 10-12 hour days on it.

It won't touch a note without your specific instruction. If you wanted to try it out you can duplicate your note and test the results on your copy. But the AI will only operate on a note when you click the cleanup button.

[RgaDawg 35]

On 5/20/2023 at 3:57 AM, agsteele said:

I've seen a demo. It looks very clever. It remains to be seen just how clever it is.

What we do know is that it will not be automatic. So if you don't start the process the AI will not touch your content. Also, when you run the AI you get a warning, explanation of what is about to happen to your data and the option to opt out. You can accept that warning so that it doesn't pop up every time or leave it as an extra check in the process.

Perfect, perfect, Thank you, thank you for this info.
I guess these will come a time down the road when we will all just have to accept Musk's quote "I just hope the computers are nice to us" when charlie Rose asked him what he thought the 3 biggest threats to humanity was. That was number 3, behind Nuclear threat and global warming ...

[ShawnVW 2]

Maybe we should request the option that when the AI cleans up a note, it makes it as a NEW note and leaves the old one intact. If this was Word we'd be calling it "Save As..."

[octans 18]

What I already don't like about it - as an Evernote Web user is that it occupies toolbar space and thus pushes even more of my frequently used toolbar items out into the "more" dropdown.   In fact now the "more" dropdown is not even displaying sometimes.   If they must put this "AI Cleanup" thing in my toolbar I'd prefer it to be at the far end.  

[gazumped 11,666]

Well,  if you can see this feature that has been rolled out to a limited number 'selected users' so far,  you are invited (I believe) to give your feedback on the implementation once it completes its activity.  Feel free to express whatever reservations you have direct to Evernote - it will have more effect than chatting here when (presumably) most of us can't see anything yet.

[RgaDawg 35]

On 5/21/2023 at 9:05 AM, scottr99 said:

..My only fear was/is it automatically cleaning up [things]

Yes, I can't have it cleaning up things .. precise info that is 5 years old automatically. But, this thread has assured me there will be plenty of options to opt in or opt out, and that it will only "clean" things one note at a time if opt in.. EN team, please remember that some pieces of notes are encrypted. Thanks to everyone for their input. I fell much better.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,959]

Here is a thread started by Evernote announcing the rollout of the beta version, with a link to the Help & Learning topic on it, and responses by users:

 

[Boot17 1,450]

22 hours ago, octans said:

What I already don't like about it - as an Evernote Web user is that it occupies toolbar space and thus pushes even more of my frequently used toolbar items out into the "more" dropdown.   In fact now the "more" dropdown is not even displaying sometimes.   If they must put this "AI Cleanup" thing in my toolbar I'd prefer it to be at the far end.  

That was my thinking too since I'm not really sure I'll ever use it. I suppose if you used it all the time, you'd be happy with its prominence there, but it does seem to fit more with other formatting options like "Simplify formatting" and "Remove formatting" that are already at the *end* of the toolbar.

However, if they were to put it at the end now, it would not get seen as much and I'm sure they want it front and center at least for now.

[gazumped 11,666]

Neither of my installed apps have that feature,  but the web version does.  Don't see that the button they used occupies a disproportionatly large chunk of screen estate.  How about some screen shots so we can see it in different setups?  -And as I said Evernote is asking for feedback.  If you don't like the setup,  make sure you tell them so.

[octans 18]

Yes I will provide them feedback as you suggest.

Screenshot below.  It seems to grey out after you've not opted to use it a few times - but still takes up the space of 3 buttons.

[PinkElephant 8,115]

Given recent experience I would have expected an "In-your-Face" box, blinking and flashing.

Maybe they asked their AI, and it proposed to avoid it after reading through the forum.

[agsteele 2,950]

7 hours ago, octans said:

It seems to grey out after you've not opted to use it a few times - but still takes up the space of 3 buttons.

If it disables after few times refusing then that is likely to be a bug.  However, there are limists to which notes can be processed. Very short and very long notes cannot be cleaned-up.

 

[gazumped 11,666]

Hmmn.  I used it for the first time today on a 690-word note.  Beyond moving a few words around to make it a little more readable and grammatically correct,  the net effect (after some impressive graphics and a short wait) was to add 3 words to the total count. 

It might help make a bad writer look a little better,  but it doesn't seem worth the effort on notes meant for personal or internal business use.

[dvollc 33]

I can't help but think, "Of all the feature/functions (f/f) they are gong to add to EN, it is AI to clean up notes?"  What about looking at what the user community is asking for?

On the other there's a quote by Steve Jobs, "People don't know what they want until you show it to them."

Ultimately, I guess what I really would like to see is a few of the highly requested f/f added along with a "one more thing" - the one I didn't know what I wanted.

[gazumped 11,666]

3 hours ago, dvollc said:

What about looking at what the user community is asking for?

Sadly,  some of the user community were already saying "what about AI then?"  And since the new owners seem to have a bit of knowledge and some connections in that direction,  it was probably relatively quick and easy to tack in on to the API.

I don't have any inside knowledge,  but I'd guess that since another user favourite is live collaboration (RTE) and and that's something they're working on now,  it's a bit difficult to deal with any other architecture changes until the syncing process is finally resolved.  Hence other bells and whistles being temporarily back-burnered.

As to it's usage,  I have to admit that though in former lives I've been a writer,  and putting together a logical and coherent stream of text is what I (used to) get paid for... it's been useful to use ChatGPT to remind myself about obscure words,  suggest ways to start a new topic,  and give me summaries of web pages, videos and podcasts so I can pick out the interesting bits.  It's a useful tool, but I would not trust it far enough to send out anything it produced with a careful read through and some tinkering of my own.

It's all (apparently) in the 'prompts' that you give it - and fortunately I see "ChatGPT for Dummies" has been published - I'll be reading that soon!

[s2sailor 2,199]

Personally, I think it is too soon and the jury is still out on whether BS will listen to forum recommendations, but  I’m hopeful.  EN, on the other hand, I felt, never listened to forum input and I thought it was pointless to vote up suggestions since it didn’t seem to matter.  Hopefully BS will be more receptive.

[gazumped 11,666]

Most companies (I think) have some form of user request system,  and occasionally they'll come across a gem of an idea,  or one that lots of users support,  and implement it stratight away.  Mostly they won't.

Users have no rights here - the only final say anyone has is to walk away from the product because it doesn't have a necessary feature.  When enought of those happen the company will  pay attention.  But a software company will spend most of its time keeping its code up to date and fixing faults as and when they arise.  They'll have a schedule to go around all the important systems - editor / sync / storage / sharing / etc in order during the year.

Someone in Marketing will be keeping an eye on the competition in case they come out with something new that might attract customers away,  and there will be a list somewhere of new features that the company can add in to keep everyone happy and maybe attract some new business. 

New coding is inherently expensive - lots of blue sky coding,  trials and testing to be done - so it's most cost effective to make changes to the editing code (forinstance) when you'd normally be doing maintenance on it anyway.  If someone comes up with a good idea at the wrong time,  it'll have to wait until the cycle goes around again - maybe in a year or so - before it can be implemented.

Few companies will comment on work in progress - why give your current customers the expectation that a swishy new feature will be available soon when testing might throw up some major issues,  or a crisis comes up that you need to address,  and the launch date goes back and back...  and your users get more and more unhappy and shout at you a lot.  And why give your competitors the chance to start their own development on that feature even before you launch your own?

Sorry for going on so long - but I'm just trying to make the point that behind the scenes,  adding new features involves lots of scheduling, budgeting and some politics.

From what little I've seen though the developments are still coming,  and I'm sure Bending Spoons didn't go through all that effort just to run the company into the ground!

[s2sailor 2,199]

32 minutes ago, gazumped said:

From what little I've seen though the developments are still coming,  and I'm sure Bending Spoons didn't go through all that effort just to run the company into the ground!

Just to be clear, I wasn’t knocking BS (unfortunate abbreviation - I’m not using it to be disparaging) at all.  I was knocking EN.  Off the top of my head I honestly can’t think of any of the, say, top five requests that were ever implemented.  Obviously they were getting input from somewhere.  Maybe if they had listened to the forum feedback a little more it wouldn’t be under new ownership.

[Dave Edwards 244]

A number of months ago Evernote ventured into the world of artificial intelligence when it introduced AI Cleanup. I have been using and here is my review.

https://daveedwardsmedia.com/2023/08/21/my-impressions-of-evernotes-ai-cleanup-tool/