The Register®

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/08/siri_wolfram/

Quarter of Wolfram Alpha brainteasers come from Siri

Apple's smart-arse software relies on boffinry website

By Anna Leach

Posted in Science, 8th February 2012 16:01 GMT

Free whitepaper – Hands on with Hyper-V 3.0 and virtual machine movement

A quarter of traffic to the intelligent computational engine Wolfram Alpha [1] comes from Siri, Stephen Wolfram said in a New York Times [2] article.

The robot-loving physicist (who once said that all science needed to know [3] could be found by studying the behaviour of cellular automata [4]) launched the knowledgable super-brain in 2009.

Wolfram's threat to knock Google down a peg or two [5] was mocked at the time, our Reg reviewer [6] declaring the web service a tool primarily for boffins. However, the computation engine has been tweaked and is now a fundamental part of Siri, helping fanboys who whisper sweet nothings into their iPhone 4Ss get intelligent responses.

Wolfram Alpha is one of the few third-party apps that feeds answers into Apple's voice-controlled know-it-all Siri: Google Maps and Yelp! local search being the other two. Siri works by following commands from users and answering their questions.

The Wolfram-backed Apple service could be one of the biggest threats to Google's search engine: the web giant's supremo Eric Schmidt said as much himself [7].

Wolfram also gets traffic from Bing [8] and is launching a paid-for premium service today, costing $4.99 a month. ®