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Wolfram Alpha Launching $4.99 A Month “Pro” Service This Week

Wolfram Alpha Launching $4.99 A Month “Pro” Service This Week

Knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha is one of our favorite web tools here at MacStories. We use it on a daily basis to look up all kinds of information – from stock prices to a specific country’s population and growth of a company over time – and since Apple integrated it with Siri on the iPhone 4S we (and many others) have come to rely on Wolfram as a trusted source for fact-checked and curated information and data analysis. The Verge takes a look at Wolfram Alpha Pro, a $4.99 a month service launching this Wednesday:

On Wednesday, February 8th, Wolfram Alpha will be adding a new, “Pro” option to its already existing services. Priced at a very reasonable $4.99 a month ($2.99 for students), the new services includes the ability to use images, files, and even your own data as inputs instead of simple text entry. The “reports” what Wolfram Alpha kicks out as a result of these (or any) query are also beefed up for Pro users, some will actually become interactive charts and all of them can be more easily exported in a variety of formats. We sat down with Stephen Wolfram himself to get a tour of the new features and to discuss what they mean for his goal of “making the world’s knowledge computable.”

The additions to the service sounds fantastic, and as I’ve already mentioned to the company, I hope the official iOS apps will be getting access to these new functionalities as well – especially if users will be able to create accounts and save favorites, it will be nice to be able to access those on the go. I particularly look forward to trying the Bring Your Own Data system, and checking whether Pro will make it easier for writers to embed data sets and reports on webpages.

Wolfram’s new Pro product should become available on Wednesday, February 8th, with a $4.99 subscription. For those who have never tried Wolfram Alpha: here’s an example query for “Apple revenue in 2011”, and Wolfram’s results for the company itself.