Boom! This is the best recipe for Siri to Evernote yet

Important!  This recipe does not work with iOS 9 present.  Something about the way Siri sends notes to the Notes app has changed and they do not sync to Gmail.

Summary

Add your Google account to your iOS settings.  Make Google the default account for iOS Notes.  Add the IFTTT recipe (below) for adding Gmail notes to Evernote.

Prefer to read this as an Evernote note?  http://bit.ly/siri2EN

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We all know that Siri can take notes for us if we ask, they will be filed away in the Notes app.  Useful if you use Notes.  However, I find the Notes app less than practical for handling large amounts of notes and it also cannot handle rich content.  For those reasons in addition to its many positive features Evernote is my go to note taking/searching app.  So wouldn’t the following be a great method for taking notes:

 

I know that many people agree with me as there are numerous ideas around including several recipes on IFTTT designed to accomplish just that functionality.  All of them are awkward in some way, e.g. you have to compose an email in Siri or add a reminder to an “Evernote” list.¹  So I started to think about a way to use Siri’s built in note taking functionality to create a note in Evernote.  By default Notes are handled by an iCloud account, but they can be synced with Gmail instead.²  I investigated how Gmail handled notes – it uses a label: “Notes”.  Simple.  Notes operate like a standard email but they arrive in All Mail not Inbox and they are labelled with “Notes”.  I then put an IFTTT recipe to work.  The trigger is any new email labelled “Notes”, the action is to add the content to a note in Evernote.  I was pleasantly surprised that this actually worked as I had tried using the “sender” of the email (i.e. my email address) as a trigger but that was unsuccessful.  View the recipe on IFTTT here:

 

Now I can add Evernotes from Siri with ease.  Here’s what the result looks like for the example above:

 

Admittedly the title/body break down is not very sophisticated but its pretty good.  Additional information can be inserted into the note via the IFTTT recipe if desired.

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¹ Also for the IFTTT recipes that use Reminders you will need to have the IFTTT app open and if it’s in the background it may not work, whereas this recipe will reliably handle everything in the cloud. 

 

² For this to work Gmail has to be the default account in Notes.  If you’re not sure how to set that up here are some instructions – screenshots are shown below.

 

Open the Settings app.  

1. Go to Mail, Contacts, Calendars > settings for the relevant Gmail account > Turn on Notes for Gmail.
Next go back to the main screen for the Settings app.
2. Go to Notes > change the default Notes account to the Gmail account.

1. Turn on notes in the Gmail account.

    

2. Make the Gmail account the default.

  

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