On Wednesday, February 8th, Wolfram Alpha will be adding a new, “Pro” option to its already existing services. Priced at a very reasonable $4.99 a month ($2.99 for students), the new services includes the ability to use images, files, and even your own data as inputs instead of simple text entry. The “reports” that Wolfram Alpha kicks out as a result of these (or any) query are also beefed up for Pro users, some will actually become interactive charts and all of them can be more easily exported in a variety of formats. We sat down with Stephen Wolfram himself to get a tour of the new features and to discuss what they mean for his goal of “making the world’s knowledge computable.”
A (re) introduction to Wolfram Alpha
First released in 2009, Wolfram Alpha presents a different way of interacting with knowledge and data than anything else out there on the web. Built on the foundation of Wolfram’s Mathematica product, Wolfram Alpha is a “knowledge engine” instead of the “search engine” that we’ve all become familiar with. What that means is that Wolfram Alpha is more structured in the query field you use to access it, the data it uses as a source, and the results that it gives you.
Wolfram Alpha is excellent at returning answers to mathematical queries and scientific queries, but it also can provide results based on its structured data. Most people know it now as one of the sources for Apple’s Siri feature on the iPhone 4S. Wolfram Alpha does analysis on every query to parse equations and even parse natural language questions to better understand what the user is asking. In fact, Wolfram tells us that in many cases the service can provide better results from Siri than from text queries because there is “more structure to what they’re saying” than what most people have trained themselves to type into search fields.
On the data front, Wolfram Alpha uses a very large set of data sources which are verified, tested, and highly structured. The company takes all that data and ensures that it’s structured again in such a way that it can be “computable,” which leads to the real power of Wolfram Alpha and explains why it’s not simply a search engine or a more reliable version of Wikipedia. Wolfram Alpha doesn’t just return information, it analyzes and does computation on your inputs and on its own data to provide “reports” instead of just “answers.”
For the complete article visit theverge.com’s Wolfram Alpha Pro democratizes data analysis: an in-depth look at the $4.99 a month service
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