By Andy Jones
Wolfram Alpha, the computational knowledge engine, has received an upgrade with several significant new features that will be offered as part of a paid subscription program known as the Wolfram Alpha Pro, starting Wednesday.
Founder and CEO of the company, Stephen Wolfram, said in a preview video that the paid service is the biggest step that Wolfram Alpha has taken since its launch. He added that rather than offering of an anonymous, drive-by experience, Wolfram Alpha Pro lets people log in the service and get more involved.
Wolfram Alpha seems to have realized the importance of personalization in improving the user experience and profitability after the launch through sponsorships and a content deal with Microsoft's Bing. The Wolfram Alpha Pro will cost a monthly $4.99, and a monthly $2.99 for students. There's also educational and enterprise pricing in place.
Wolfram Alpha Pro's most significant feature is its ability to accept images as input. Subscribers can drag images onto the Wolfram Alpha Web page and the service will return image statistics (dimensions, aspect ratio, etc.), image metadata, color information, and a series of image panels. These allow image filtering operations similar to basic operations in Adobe Photoshop. Pro users are entitled to 20 image queries per month at no extra charge.
With the help of the image interface, users can enable interactions for several kinds of graphics by converting static images into CDF (computational document format) files, which can be played with in real-time. Also, the image interface offers support for downloading raw data and for customizing and saving images. These kind of files can be used on other Websites or even in online presentations.
Another Wolfram Alpha Pro feature is data uploading, where users can enter numerical or tabular data directly into a Wolfram Alpha browser text box to be analyzed. Wolfram demonstrates this capability in his preview video, that it can also be used to perform statistical analysis on a data set of message dates and message subject categories. The service then automatically organizes the data to create relevant charts about the message content.
"What we're doing here is we're using all the linguistic capabilities of Wolfram Alpha to understand the data that was input," said Wolfram. "The mission of Wolfram Alpha Pro is to tell a story, to tell us something interesting about the data." In order to enable data uploading, Wolfram Alpha supports more than 60 different file formats for data, sound, text, and graphics.
Also offered in Wolfram Alpha Pro is a computational keyboard that can be used to enter the Greek symbols used for mathematical formulas. It, however, increases the computational time available for queries, which reduces the probability of computationally intensive queries.
Wolfram said, "Working with data has been a specialty activity in the past. What Wolfram Alpha has done- and I've been very pleased about this- is taken these things that were expert activities and made them consumer activities."
