Thoughts on AI-powered search?

[Bill Myers 468]

I've been playing around with AI search and it's been pretty hit or miss. Sometimes it zeroes in on exactly the note I want, and sometimes the search results are downright nonsensical. For instance, I told it to find notes about sales prospecting and it came up with a pretty good list, although four of the 12 search results don't even contain the search terms.

On the other hand, I also told it to find notes about writing and it found a bunch of notes about something called Dialectical Behavior Therapy, one of which it identified as the best match. On the other hand, a note with a webclip about something called "Story Grid," which is about writing, was buried about halfway down in the search results.

This is not an "I hate Evernote" or "AI is teh suck" post. But I'm genuinely curious if anyone else has tried AI search and if so what their experience has been. It is in beta, so that may have something to do with its lack of accuracy. I'm also wondering if it's going to learn as I use it more. For that matter, maybe there are ways to word my searched better than I am (although if it's really finicky, I think that would defeat the purpose of a tool that is supposed to enable us to use natural language queries)?

I'd be very interested to know how it's working for others who have tried it. I actually think it could be a very useful tool for me, but based on what little I've seen, it looks like it has a ways to go.

[s2sailor 2,426]

I'm currently in the meh category.  I've tried it a few times with mixed results.  To be honest, I would try it more if it was entirely in-house.  I'm not thrilled about my notes going to a third party.  I understand they are protected and deleted after a time, but to me, it is one more potential fault area.

[Jon/t 1,654]

I see similar to you. I use it a fair bit.

Its better for answers to specific questions. It does seem to have trouble speculating and working in tenses so next/last troubles it.

I ask it for a specific like a phone number for someone or an insurance policy number then its great.

I'd love to see an in-house, private version where the Ai is on Evernote servers and we each have our own mini-ai that learns from our own note-taking, questions and behaviour. Would only want to see this if the Ai was run by Evernote on Evernote servers though.

[Boot17 1,536]

I did try it a few times for kicks, but I just don't use it at all right now because it didn't seem to be that great yet and the risk tradeoff didn't seem to be worth it to continue playing with it.

I think one reason why language learnings models can be pretty good now is because, among other things, there is a wide array of good data and documentation out there on the web. I think often times our notes are a bit of a mess or incomplete and we depend on our meat brains to fill in and make sense of the missing gaps. Unfortunately, language learning models can't fill in those missing gaps in our own notes so I don't think they are going to work as well as language learning models can work in general.

I should take better notes -- not just for the AI-enabled note searching future, but for myself right now as well.

I do think it's the future of search though... we have the first baby step now working towards when we finally have that AI chip implant in our brains that will instantly recall all information and experiences to us. Just hope it's not a Borg future.

 

[Dave-in-Decatur 4,006]

@Boot17, wish I could put both 💙 and 😵 as a reaction on your post.

1 hour ago, Boot17 said:

we have the first baby step now working towards when we finally have that AI chip implant in our brains that will instantly recall all information and experiences to us

And, um, will there be a way to turn  that off? 😬

[Wanderling Reborn 186]

3 hours ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

@Boot17, wish I could put both 💙 and 😵 as a reaction on your post.

And, um, will there be a way to turn  that off? 😬

Yes, it will turn itself off when it shorts if you walk too close to a microwave. May require a replacement brain....

[Mishkafofer 31]

I am not betting on AI search. Not good enough. I sprinkle keywords in my notes. Sometime add tags and link to other notes.

[mrcharts 0]

does anyone know what the additional cost will be of "AI=Powered Search"  after the trial period?

Thanks

[Bill Myers 468]

On 2/12/2024 at 12:36 PM, mrcharts said:

does anyone know what the additional cost will be of "AI=Powered Search"  after the trial period?

Thanks

I don't. To the best of my knowledge, Bending Spoons hasn't said anything about that yet. For all we know, they could bundle AI with the Professional tier as an incentive to upgrade. Or they could charge more for it. What I'm saying is that it's a big question mark right now.

[Dave-in-Decatur 4,006]

5 hours ago, Bill Myers said:

For all we know, they could bundle AI with the Professional tier as an incentive to upgrade.

Based on my very limited experience with AI-powered search: 😂😂😂😂

[Bill Riski 3]

AI-Powered Search is very promising for one of my use cases. I wrote 60 articles some time ago for my Dataw Historic Foundation (DHF) about people, places, and events that interest our community in the Lowcountry of SC. I can use the EvNt webclipper to bring the finished/published articles into Evernote. So far, this has worked well. Once in Evernote, I'm using the AI-Powered Search to summarize each article to create an index of abstracts about this body of work.

Here are the two problems I've encountered. First, given that AI-Powered Search feature wants to search all my notes, that's fine. But this DHF body of history notes is about 60 in my Evernote library of 9,000. So, the Search often grabs notes irrelevant to what I want to summarize. I like that I can see the notes it selects, but how do I get the search to focus on the correct set of notes? I have tried rather unsuccessfully to rephrase the question I am asking. This may be an 'operator error' on my part. However, given that it's straightforward to use boolean logic and other Evernote filtering features when doing a standard search to limit the focus, I find it odd that I cannot do this in the AI-powered Search. I've read the relevant HELP documents and interacted with the EvNt bot on this, to no avail. 

Second, some of the articles I want to summarize include PDFs. Evernote is famous for searching inside PDFs within notes. Not so with AI-Powered Search, or at least it is not apparent to me that it is doing this. Again, none of the HELP documents address this for AI-Powered Search.

Any ideas I can try?

P.S. Using the EvNt desktop app on my Apple iMac.

Edited March 3 by Bill Riski
Clarify my platform.

[Jon/t 1,654]

12 minutes ago, Bill Riski said:

Any ideas I can try?

You can use "in notebook <whatever>" or "tagged <whatever>".

May help filterthe noise out. 

[Bill Riski 3]

Thanks Jon - so far that has helped. I'll try a few more times on a variety of notes/articles. Much appreciated.