Launch preparations for WolframAlpha began on May 15, 2009, at 7:00 pm CDT with a live broadcast on Justin.tv. The plan was to publicly launch the service a few hours later.[4][5] However, there were issues due to extreme load. The service officially launched on May 18, 2009, receiving mixed reviews.[6][7][8]
On February 8, 2012, WolframAlpha Pro was released,[13] offering users additional features for a monthly subscription fee.[13][14]
Usage
Users submit queries and computation requests via a text field. WolframAlpha then computes answers and relevant visualizations from a knowledge base of structured data that comes from other sites and books. It can respond to 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.[citation needed]
WolframAlpha was used to power some searches in the MicrosoftBing and DuckDuckGo search engines, although it is no longer used to provide results.[15][16] For factual question answering, WolframAlpha was used by Apple's Siri in October 2011 and Amazon Alexa in December 2018 for math and science queries.[17][18] Users noticed that the Wolfram Integration for Siri was changed in June 2013 to use Bing to query certain results on iOS 7.[19] Starting with iOS 17, it was reported that Wolfram for Siri no longer answers mathematical equations, instead defaulting to web search queries with no notable explanation.[20][21] WolframAlpha data types[clarification needed], sets of curated information and formulas that assist in creating, categorization, and filling of spreadsheet information, became available in July 2020 within Microsoft Excel.[22] The Microsoft-Wolfram partnership ended nearly two years later, in 2022, in favor of Microsoft Power Query data types.[23] WolframAlpha functionality in Microsoft Excel ended in June 2023.[24][25]
