Wolfram Alpha has just released a new service that promises to analyze all of the data you can manage to throw at it—for a price. The service, called Wolfram Alpha Pro, will cost $2.99 per month for students and $4.95 per month for everyone else.
The original Wolfram Alpha, a popular search tool, launched in 2009 and has become fairly well-known since then—Apple’s Siri voice search tool accesses it for searches, and many curious people use it to search for information from the integral of a mathematical function to the airspeed of an unladen African swallow.
The new Pro version provides two unique features not found in the free version we’re familiar with. First, in addition to taking basic text queries, over 60 data formats are supported, including images, binary files and tables of data. Wolfram Alpha Pro will take your input and analyze it however it can—for example, it might detect the edges of a photograph or create a graph of the data found in a table.
The other new feature is the ability to interact with the analysis provided by the software. For example, a user might be able to change the scale of a mathematical graph, or view a molecule from different angles. Interaction capabilities vary depending on the analysis presented.
Wolfram Alpha Pro can’t analyze everything, however—in a demonstration by creator Stephen Wolfram, the service was unable to make sense of a table of income figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. There’s also no way to specify what kind of analysis you’re looking for—you simply enter the data and let the software analyze it in whatever way makes sense to it.
Dr. Wolfram says that the launch this week is only a beginning, but the capabilities of the “computational knowledge engine” will no doubt expand quickly, just as they did with the free tool released in 2009. That launch was initially met with skepticism due to its focus on math and science queries, but it has since grown to understand and respond to a much wider variety of requests. The same will likely hold true for Wolfram Alpha Pro.
