Concept
WolframAlpha (ˈwʊlf.rəm- ) is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It answers factual queries by computing answers from externally sourced data. WolframAlpha was released on May 18, 2009, and is based on Wolfram's earlier product Wolfram Mathematica, a technical computing platform. WolframAlpha gathers data from academic and commercial websites such as the CIA's The World Factbook, the United States Geological Survey, a Cornell University Library publication called All About Birds, Chambers Biographical Dictionary, Dow Jones, the Catalogue of Life, CrunchBase, Best Buy, and the FAA to answer queries. A Spanish language version was launched in 2022. Users submit queries and computation requests via a text field. WolframAlpha then computes answers and relevant visualizations from a knowledge base of curated, structured data that come from other sites and books. It can respond to particularly phrased natural language fact-based questions. It displays its "Input interpretation" of such a question, using standardized phrases. It can also parse mathematical symbolism and respond with numerical and statistical results. WolframAlpha is written in the Wolfram Language, a multi-paradigm programming language, and implemented in Mathematica. Wolfram language is proprietary and not commonly used by developers. WolframAlpha was used to power some searches in the Microsoft Bing and DuckDuckGo search engines but is no longer used to provide search results. For factual question answering, WolframAlpha was used by Apple's Siri and Amazon Alexa for math and science queries but is no longer operational within those services. WolframAlpha became available in July 2020 within Microsoft Excel, but the Microsoft-Wolfram partnership ended nearly two years later, in 2022, in favor of Microsoft Power Query data types. WolframAlpha functionality in Microsoft Excel will end in June 2023. Launch preparations for WolframAlpha began on May 15, 2009 at 7 p.m. CDT and were broadcast live on Justin.tv. The plan was to publicly launch the service a few hours later.