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The Evernote Cloud is moving to Google

Evernote published a post last week announcing that the Evernote Cloud is going to migrate to the Google Cloud Platform. It probably isn’t going to make a significant difference to the average user (well, except if it means the service is faster and more stable).

That said, one paragraph caught my interest:

In addition to scale, speed, and stability, Google will also give Evernote access to some of the same deep-learning technologies that power services like translation, photo management, and voice search. We look forward to taking advantage of these technologies to help you more easily connect your ideas, search for information in Evernote, and find the right note at the moment you need it. That’s exciting to us, and we’re already exploring some ideas that we think you’ll love.

Whenever I think about the features I’d like to see in Evernote, a couple often come to mind:

  • translation; and
  • better search and discoverability.

I don’t know how Google’s capabilities would be incorporated into Evernote in future versions but I can already see how some sort of Google Translate integration could be enormously useful to me.

I don’t use Evernote for simple text notes. I use it to capture and store information for reference purposes. I have all sorts of data in Evernote including:

  • Utility bills;
  • Articles on work-related themes that I may want to reference later;
  • School information for our kids (class schedules, consent forms and so on);
  • Briefs for work projects that expand as projects develop; and more.

More and more of the stuff I capture into Evernote is in Hebrew because, well, we live in Israel and virtually all of our interactions with our kids’ school, utility providers and government is in Hebrew. My Hebrew is improving, just really slowly.

Unfortunately it doesn’t always keep up with my day-to-day needs so having the ability to translate stuff in Evernote will be really helpful! My wife doesn’t use Evernote so I also keep copies of most of our stuff in shared Google Drive folders and often use Google Docs to translate letters we get from the school. It works for the most part so I can see how this capability would be really useful in Evernote too.

My Evernote notebooks are a little cluttered and I have over 25 000 notes. The search function is usually fine but a bit of machine intelligence could make it a lot easier to find stuff I’ve buried in my notebooks.

As for photo management and voice search … well, that could be interesting. Major updates tend to come along fairly slowly and I guess we’ll have to see what happens in the future.

Image credit: Evernote, licensed CC BY-ND 2.0