I’ve had a go at the Wolfram Alpha ‘knowledge engine’ preview.
Sadly, in my experience, it’s a bit disappointing: US-centric and effective only in specific, limited domains.
It gave no results for many of my queries, for example:
- ‘What is the population of Adelaide’ (capital of South Australia)
- ‘Tim Winton prizes’ (Australian writer)
- ‘where is Kapunda’ (town in South Australia — misinterpreted as an animal, kakunda)
- ‘where is Wandsworth, London’ (Wandsworth is a London borough — gives a ‘did you mean wadsworth’ response)
- ‘why is DAB radio delayed’ (and variations — ‘Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input’)
Alpha is a great project with a lot of potential — to provide well presented, accurate answers to questions asked in natural language.
But they better be quick or the world — or Google — will move on.
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Of course google has no problem!
q: ‘What is the population of Adelaide’
a: Adelaide — Population: 1,158,259 (2007) (5th)
q: Tim Winton prizes
a: Tim Winton in line for a fourth Miles Franklin prize | Books …
q: where is Kapunda
a: [ link to google maps for kapunda ]
NLP – why bother?
It’s not clear what Alpha is offering.
Is it just Ask Jeeves with a more expensive education — or what?
With Google you know what to expect.
FWIW, WA now answers all these questions (save the last one) with a legit and topical answer now. 🙂
Hi Paul — you’re right — the responses are much improved since two years ago.
Still nothing useful for ‘Tim Winton prizes’ — which works pretty well with Google and Bing.