New features available soon in v11
- AI Assistant - Chat with AI about your notes and get answers based on your content
- Semantic Search - Find notes by meaning, not just keywords
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AI Meeting Notes - Automatically transcribe and summarize your audio recordings (with support for multiple speakers!)
Frequently Asked Questions
Is my data private and secure?
Absolutely. Your notes and personal information remain private to you. Individual accounts are always kept separate, and your content is never exposed to other users.
How is my data used?
Evernote does not use your content to train AI models and does not permit any third parties to use your content to train AI models.
For AI Assistant specifically:
- Data sent to the third party (OpenAI) is processed solely to fulfill your request.
- All data is deleted immediately after the response, with no retention.
- OpenAI does not use your data to train its models.
Semantic Search uses Evernote’s internal AI models. To help you find the most relevant content, Evernote performs an advanced form of note indexing, which occurs securely on Evernote’s servers and no content is shared externally.
AI Meeting Notes generates audio transcriptions using Evernote’s internal models. Audio summaries may be processed by a third-party AI vendor. Only the specific recordings you choose to transcribe are used.
Can I control these AI features?
Yes. AI features are fully customizable. All features are activated by default, but you can enable or disable individual AI features at any time in your settings.
- On desktop/web: Go to Settings > Preferences > AI features.
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On mobile: Go to Settings > AI features.
Who owns the content?
Your data is yours. Adding notes or other content to Evernote does not change its ownership or copyright. Content that belongs to you before upload continues to belong to you, and content that does not belong to you remains the property of its original owner.
What types of content can AI process?
AI Assistant and Semantic Search process text in your notes as well as content in attachments by using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This means both features can understand content in PDFs and images. AI Meeting Notes processes the audio files you choose to transcribe and summarize.
Information processing
Evernote treats all your content as confidential and private, in accordance with our 🔗 3 Laws of Data Protection.
AI Assistant and Semantic Search will reference all relevant notes in your account in order to bring you an optimized result. This includes text inside attachments, which AI Assistant and Semantic Search can reference using OCR (Optical Character Recognition). These features are able to understand and reference your content through note indexing.
How does note indexing work?
To help you find the most relevant content, Evernote uses advanced note indexing that goes beyond matching exact words. Instead, it analyzes the overall meaning of your notes so it can understand what your content is about, not just what it says.
When you use Semantic Search or AI Assistant, Evernote compares the topic of your query with the topics of your notes. This means a note can appear in your results even if it doesn’t contain the exact words you typed, as long as its content is about the same subject. For example, if you search for “Italian recipe,” Evernote might return a note titled “How to make lasagna,” even if none of the words in your search appear in the note.
Technically, Evernote does this by generating embeddings as part of its standard note indexing process. Embeddings are semantic representations of your content that allow Evernote to understand context and meaning. They use vectors (numerical codes) to represent the topics in your notes, with similar vectors assigned to content that covers similar subjects.
These embeddings are generated automatically using AI and stored exclusively on Evernote’s internal servers. They are treated as private and confidential, just like all other Evernote data. No content or indexing data is shared externally, and the indexing process remains internal and anonymized.
When you perform a search or use AI Assistant, Evernote compares the meaning of your query with the indexed meaning of your notes and surfaces the most relevant content in response.
Instead, AI Meeting Notes only references the specific audio recording that you choose to transcribe.
Due to technical requirements on macOS, you may be prompted to grant permissions for screen recording and audio sharing when using AI Meeting Notes. However, Evernote only collects and processes your audio input.
Third-party integration & data handling
While Semantic Search and the core functionality of AI Meeting Notes are powered by AI tools within Evernote’s infrastructure, AI Assistant and the summary feature in AI Meeting Notes use OpenAI’s technology.
How is data shared, stored, and retained by our third-party provider?
Data is sent to OpenAI for AI Assistant to provide an answer. However, no data is stored on their servers for further processing. After AI Assistant answers, OpenAI deletes the data which was sent as part of the request. This includes both the contents of your chat and any additional context provided over the course of the conversation (any notes you selected plus any returned via search results).
When you generate a summary with AI Meeting Notes, the same process applies. Data is sent to OpenAI in order to generate the output, but no data is stored on their servers for further processing. After the summary has been generated, the data which was sent to OpenAI as part of the request is deleted.
This means that your data will only stay on OpenAI servers long enough for them to answer your request.
OpenAI does not use your data to train its models.
Does Evernote read or store any personal data?
Evernote collects and stores some personal data to run your account—like your email address, account details, and basic device information. The same 🔗 3 Laws of Data Protection apply to all personal data, whether used by AI Features or not.
Will my data ever be mixed with other users’ data when I use the AI features?
No, your data remains private, secure, and anonymized—it is never exposed to other Evernote customers.
Does Evernote train AI models with user data?
None of the AI features inside of Evernote use your data to train Evernote’s AI or third-party AI models.
- AI Assistant. Evernote data is not used to train OpenAI’s models, and the AI Assistant doesn’t “learn” about the user over time. Every new chat is treated as a completely separate instance. This means that the AI Assistant doesn’t “know” anything about you before you start the chat, and can only reference information in the ongoing chat and any relevant notes.
- Semantic Search. While Semantic search relies on AI (which we use for indexing, as explained in Information Processing), no data or content is ever shared externally, nor is it used to train any kind of AI models.
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AI Meeting Notes. AI meeting note transcription is powered by internal AI tools—no information is shared externally of Evernote. As with the other features, none of the content captured during AI meeting transcription is used to train AI models.
Opting out of AI features
AI features in Evernote are optional and can be managed from each user’s Settings, in Preferences. All AI features are enabled by default, but if you prefer, you can individually disable or enable each AI feature in your account settings. Disabling a feature makes it impossible to use it in your Evernote account. This includes: AI Assistant, Semantic Search, and AI Meeting Notes.
- On desktop/web: Go to Settings > Preferences > AI features.
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On mobile: Go to Settings > AI features.
Accuracy
AI Assistant
The new chat function, AI Assistant, uses information in your account to reply to your requests and can search the web to look for helpful information online.
However, AI Assistant can still make mistakes, so you should always double-check important information.
Semantic Search
Semantic Search uses the information in your account to surface the most relevant results and ranks them based on how closely they match your query. It searches the entire contents of your account—including information inside files—and delivers more accurate results because it understands the context and meaning of your text. By contrast, the regular Evernote search relies solely on matching keywords.
Recently added or edited content may take a short time to appear in Semantic Search, so results can occasionally be incomplete.
AI Meeting Notes
AI Meeting Notes converts speech to text using different AI models—specialized tools for tasks such as transcription, speaker recognition, and summary generation.
Mistakes in transcripts generated by AI Meeting Notes may occur due to variations in audio quality, recording environment, or speech patterns.
Content ownership
Evernote does not claim ownership of your content or data. As explained in our 🔗 3 Laws of Data Protection, this applies to all data in your Evernote, including data processed and generated by AI.
Users should be aware that, although they are assigned the intellectual property of any content generated by AI features in Evernote as a result of their requests, this content may be incorrect, may not be original, and similar outputs may be provided to other users. See the 🔗 Supplemental Terms for further details.
Content moderation
We’ve implemented safeguarding measures in AI Assistant to prevent it from responding to requests that are inappropriate or otherwise non-compliant to our 🔗 Terms of Service. In these situations, you’ll see a message like “I’m sorry I can’t discuss this topic,” or a similar notice.
Usage
To ensure performance and prevent abuse, safeguard limits apply to the length of a chat with AI Assistant. If you reach your usage limit, you’ll be asked to start a new chat.
Note: This page will be updated as we release additional features and capabilities.
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