For factual question answering, WolframAlpha was formerly used by Apple's Siri and Amazon Alexa for math and science queries but is no longer operational within those services.

WolframAlpha was used to power some searches in the Microsoft Bing and DuckDuckGo search engines but is no longer used to provide search results. WolframAlpha is written in the Wolfram Language, a general multi-paradigm programming language, and implemented in Mathematica, that is proprietary and not commonly used by developers. Mathematical symbolism can also be parsed by the engine, which responds with numerical and statistical results. It displays its 'Input interpretation' of such a question, using standardized phrases. It is able to respond to particularly phrased natural language fact-based questions. WolframAlpha then computes answers and relevant visualizations from a knowledge base of curated, structured data that come from other sites and books. Users submit queries and computation requests via a text field. 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.

WolframAlpha was released on May 18, 2009, and is based on Wolfram's earlier product Wolfram Mathematica, a technical computing platform. It answers factual queries by computing answers from externally sourced data.

r əm-/ WUULf-rəm-) is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research.

May 18, 2009 13 years ago ( ) (official launch)

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