Wolfram Alpha Pro Revealed, Seeks To End Wiki-Ness
It appears that Wolfram Alpha is bringing the fury to the student base of the world with no less than a pay-per-month service that amps their already powerful question and answer service up to an equitable level for professionals. While Wikipedia may be, sadly enough, one of the main knowledge wells in the world right now for students hoping to get their answers to questions quick, Wolfram Alpha brings the curated non-crowd-sourced knowledge vault to your browser window and your Siri on the daily. As Wolfram Alpha already powers a free service and works with the iPhone 4S to provide you with Siri's go-to resource for data, they bring a $4.95 a month (or $2.99 for students) service to the market today with abilities above and beyond what they've offered in the past.
This pro service is allowing you the users to manipulate the data that Wolfram Alpha outputs. In addition, this version of WA is ablto to take inputs from up to 60 different data formats including binary structures of data files, images copied and pasted, and queries so simple as "what's the capitol of Assyria?" What you're able to do here with the Pro version is not just query what Wolfram Alpha has in its own data banks, but the data you input as well. Give Pro a set of data and ask it what it has to say about it.
"We're not just dealing with knowledge from the world at large, we're also dealing with a kind of individual knowledge that people have, and take data that people have, and upload it, and allow them to dip into it. ... You take the data, throw it at Wolfram Alpha Pro, and see what it has to say about it." – Wolfram
This entire process is done with Computational Document Format, the format which you'll have the option to save with in Pro. This data format allows you to interact with your data rather than just have WA read you a static report. WA Pro goes so far as to launch a viewer for some data sets that allows you to change the scales of graphs, manipulate the data based on the output, and more.
Again Wolfram Alpha is currently integrated with iPhone 4S's Siri, but there's an iOS app as well as an Android app out there as well, and the Pro versions for mobile will be upon us soon too. Stick around and check em all out – or go ahead and get in on the Wolfram Alpha Pro beta-testing program right now!
[via PCMag]