Apple’s Siri voice-recognition and digital assistant technology has been extremely popular since it was released alongside the iPhone 4S. According to The New York Times, Siri now makes up nearly 25% of all Wolfram Alpha search queries just 4 months after its release.
Siri accounts for about a quarter of the queries fielded by Wolfram Alpha, whose staff has grown to 200. Several large companies in health care, financial services and oil and gas recently hired Dr. Wolfram’s private company, Wolfram Research, to do tailored corporate versions of Wolfram Alpha for them. Microsoft also licenses Wolfram Alpha technology.
Wolfram Alpha isn’t just a search engine, however – it’s more like a dynamic information service. Rather than searching the web for keywords and retrieving a list of results like most search products, Wolfram Alpha uses its own knowledge database, and is specifically design for math, science, and general knowledge questions.
It can perform calculations, provide word definitions, retrieve statistical data (for instance, you can ask it about a company’s annual revenue and it will retrieve a direct result), and display show times, and is designed to handle entire sentences. These unique features are what makes Wolfram Alpha ideal for Siri, and more useful for many informational errands than traditional search engines.
Judging by Apple’s strong sales of the iPhone 4S, and their continuing domination of mobile sales in general, it’s likely that Wolfram Alpha has only just seen the beginning of Siri’s effect on their servers.