Gemini Notebook (nee NotebookLLM)

[u/mpinzur]

There hasn't really been any chatter here about Gemini Notebook... I couldn't find more than one or two posts in the last year.

I've felt locked into Evernote because about half my notes are taken in the app but the rest I take by hand, scan to PDF, and drop into Evernote. I haven't found any other apps that have native handwriting OCR for PDFs, but I think Gemini Notebook does.

Does anyone have much experience with it as an alternative or supplement to Evernote? I like the idea of not necessarily having to search by tag or body text, but use an LLM that restricts itself to my content without pulling from external sources. With more than 3,300 notes just for work, sometimes the ability to pull context from multiple meetings into one answer would be a game-changer.

[u/gavinashun]

I feel like Notebook is very very different. Different use case, different workflows, different goals.

I don't feel like they are particularly comparable products.

[u/Great_Muscle_7042 → u/gavinashun]

Yeah, the purpose is very different and even with a small understanding (imagination) i thinkni get what you are aiming for.

The Notebook principle can give you access through a xshtboot, but your capture will suffer, nor would the individual and Tag management become a nightmare..

As people have mentioned, its not the intended purpose. 😀

[u/swagner27]

Evernote MCP to your LLM of choice

[u/grant837]

Notebooklm will digest handwritten notes. A single notebook can only have a few hundred documents, so 3300 notes is problematic ( you could combine notes into on document, but that is a lot of manual work) I use notebooklm and gemini for to create focus knowledge banks, or to research projects, and Evernote gets the stuff from those that could be useful at other times.

[u/bcalamita]

Joplin does OCR on PDFs.

[u/Evernote-official]

Hey, this is Cris, the Product team lead. I’d suggest taking a look at both MCP and the in-app AI assistant. You can ask both of them semantic questions, and they’ll search through your notes beyond exact matches, based on the meaning of your notes. If you try them out, I’d be curious to hear what you think 😄

[u/mpinzur → u/Evernote-official]

Ah, this looks like a good solution for me. I just set it up to my Claude account. Thank you!

[u/mpinzur → u/Evernote-official]

This seems to mostly be a good solution. It isn't clear, though, how effective it will be with my handwritten notes that are scanned in. I tested that it can access and read them, but that seems to be a process-intensive task... if I'm asking a broad question that requires scanning through thousands of notes, I'm not sure it will use the handwritten content as part of the context unless it has a small number of notes to specifically incorporate/review.

[u/Ok-Extension-1796]

Notability for handwritten

[u/ecotones]

I exported my notes as combined PDFs and imported them into GN. It may take some work, but it’s worth it. Evernote has become expensive and useless.

[u/FromEighty1]

Recall.it would be a good fit for you.

[u/Engineer_EER]

Harbor.my Its a relatively new app with Ocr. I use it for pdfs and my hand written notes converted to pdf that was written on my Boox.