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Author Nicholas Carlson in conversation with Evernote CEO Phil Libin


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  • Level 5*

An interesting interview.

 

1. The transcription service would be wonderful for regular folks (like me) who leave themselves voice messages about what they are reading, writing, or researching as well. I doubt there is a huge market, unless you could also get into the transcription of university lectures and so forth. Then, you are talking about some major traction, but I wonder if I could transcribe audio for someone from a lecture without being able to refer to the handouts and so on. Maybe this just isn't possible with our current tech.

 

2. The Context stuff, for me, isn't yet terribly useful. However, it certainly has potential, if Evernote can move beyond reporting into things like JSTOR, Wikipedia, Google Books, and so forth. Hookups with that kind of stuff could be quite impressive. 

 

3. I don't know what search problems Nicholas had, but I do think a smart way to determine relevancy is to also show notes in the search results that are possibly related, but didn't directly match the search. You'd want to have a way to turn this on/off (to avoid upsetting search purists), perhaps with a "fuzzy" search button, and you'd want to clearly mark the potentially relevant stuff to make it distinguishable from the direct hits, but that might solve the problem of not finding what you thought had this or that term in it. An algorithm that recognizes words commonly occurring in association with the search terms, for example, might accomplish this. In my opinion, this kind of an improvement in search capabilities would also accomplish some of the personal brain type stuff some of us are more interested in seeing. 

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A very interesting way to organize notes when writing a book. But terribly manual: make heading via bold letters and then search for them, copy and paste them to the top and then to a headings document. All manually. Are we using computers here?

 

IMHO this really calls for:

  • A Headings format in Evernote.
  • And then an automation to put the headings in a page index on top. Like word does for you.
  • And then to be able to automatically split notes into individual ones. Like every heading becomes the topic of a new note.
  • Then one could use tabs or numbers in the topic of the notes to sort them and this would make the structure of the book. 

Well, but maybe then there are too few writers and journalists around that would make all of this worthwhile?

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An interesting interview.

 

1. The transcription service would be wonderful for regular folks (like me) who leave themselves voice messages about what they are reading, writing, or researching as well. I doubt there is a huge market, unless you could also get into the transcription of university lectures and so forth. Then, you are talking about some major traction, but I wonder if I could transcribe audio for someone from a lecture without being able to refer to the handouts and so on. Maybe this just isn't possible with our current tech.

 

2. The Context stuff, for me, isn't yet terribly useful. However, it certainly has potential, if Evernote can move beyond reporting into things like JSTOR, Wikipedia, Google Books, and so forth. Hookups with that kind of stuff could be quite impressive. 

 

3. I don't know what search problems Nicholas had, but I do think a smart way to determine relevancy is to also show notes in the search results that are possibly related, but didn't directly match the search. You'd want to have a way to turn this on/off (to avoid upsetting search purists), perhaps with a "fuzzy" search button, and you'd want to clearly mark the potentially relevant stuff to make it distinguishable from the direct hits, but that might solve the problem of not finding what you thought had this or that term in it. An algorithm that recognizes words commonly occurring in association with the search terms, for example, might accomplish this. In my opinion, this kind of an improvement in search capabilities would also accomplish some of the personal brain type stuff some of us are more interested in seeing. 

 

What is this about transcription? Sorry didnt watch the video...

 

Can we transcribe Audio files on our PC using Evernote? Does it Auto transcribe? Or is this something planned?

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  • Level 5*

I was very surprised that Carlson didn't ask for a collapsable outline feature.

Seems like with very long Notes this would be a huge benefit.

 

Also, seems like links within a Note (HTML bookmarks) would seem to be very useful for long notes that you then summarize at the top of the Note.  It would be great if you could like a summary line to the actual interview text below.

These would also be very handy to use in other Notes to point directly to the section in another Note that you want to reference.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • Level 5*

Books can be written in Evernote fairly well. Maybe these folk like the challenge. That's why I start a game of Tetris at about level 6 or 7.

 

Using that rationale, one could write a book in Notepad, or TextEdit.

If you really want a challenge, why not just use a typewriter?   ;)

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