Here at CyberNet we’re huge fans of the Evernote software (review), which comes in both free and paid versions. They are going one step further by offering an online note-taking service (currently in private Beta) that will inevitably sync with their desktop clients. There is also a Web Clipper available for integration into Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, and then on the mobile front there will be a Windows Mobile, Java-based, and iPhone clippers available. It’s safe to assume that Evernote will be everywhere that you are.
The most powerful feature in Evernote has got to be the incredible text recognition capabilities. Evernote is able to look for text in your images, and then make it searchable within their application… and the website will be no different! Any photos hosted on your Evernote account will be analyzed for both handwritten and typed text, and it will be completely searchable!
Sound too good to be true? Not at all. You can signup to be put on a waiting list for their Beta program, but they’ve also setup a publicly available note site that demonstrates the powerful text search feature. Look through the images they have in the sidebar, and then choose some text to search for. If you’re anything like me you’ll be surprised at how much it is actually capable of recognizing.
Here’s a video of how it all works:
I have to admit that this could bring a new age to note taking. With the mobile applications available people can snap photos with their cellphone as a way to index business cards, receipts, and much more. Then almost as fast as you can snap the photo you can search for the text contained within it. Pretty cool, huh?
[via TechCrunch]
Evernote is great, but if the online version is not free… there’s no point to using it.
[clipmarks.com]
[amb.vis.ne.jp]
Were’s the opera love
I beg to differ. Just because you would have to pay for it doesn’t rule out the usefulness of the service. Several of my friends have already said that they would be willing to pay a few bucks a month for a service that powerful.
I’ve been eagerly reading the Evernote blog and been quite excited about this service. That is until today when I got my invite and rushed to try and use it. I imported an image with text in it, but Evernote couldn’t find the text. I decided to get an easier image so wrote a number on some paper and took a photo – still nothing. Finally I got a high res photo of my screen – couldn’t find a single letter.
I know its harsh to criticise something that’s obviously had so much attention put into it, but after the demonstrations of it finding obscure handwritten text I expected it could at least find massive printed text in an image. It leads me to think that the demos had metadata or something to allow it to find the text, which doesn’t really add to its effectiveness. Bit of a shame really.
Thanks for the update. I just got my invite as well, but I haven’t gotten around to trying it. It’s odd that their demo worked so well and you’re having troubles getting anywhere near reproducing their results. I wonder if it would be any better with typed text such as that on a receipt.