A new update to the Evernote app for Android is rolling out today in the Google Play Store. While the version 7.17 of the productivity and note taking app is mostly a bug fix release, there is a new feature showing up for some users, Collect.
Collect, according to the release notes, allows you to save images containing text that you want to remember later. Evernote will save it then you can search for it, and presumably the text inside the image, later in the app or online. The release notes indicate that the feature works with whiteboards, receipts, document and anything with text.
The new feature fundamentally builds on a feature that has already been in Evernote which would allow it to identify text in images. That’s been around for several years. Rather, this feature seems to point to a more AI driven response to text in images, allowing them to be searchable. So, for example, if I go eat at the restaurant El Sabor and I take a picture of my receipt, I could then do a search in Evernote for “El Sabor” and it would find that receipt.
There is no word yet on when (or if) this new Collect feature will roll out more broadly. This limited release to some users indicates that they are doing some final testing of the feature so it may not be too long. Remember that Evernote last year moved to Google Cloud Platform as the back end cloud solution for their platform and customers. They could well be leveraging some of Google’s AI and Machine Learning to make Collect really powerful.
If you have the feature, let me know. I’m not one of the lucky ones who got it so I’d love to hear what you think & how it works (with full credit to you on an update to this post of course)
