Remember Wolfram Alpha, that tool that saved your high school calculus grade? Now you can use it with Amazon's voice assistant.
Alexa is now integrated with Wolfram Alpha, which enables it to answer more difficult questions precisely. Previously, Alexa primarily drew from Wikipedia and Yelp, as well as specialized databases such as IMDB and Accuweather, to respond to your queries.
When you ask a search engine such as Google for the answer to a math problem, it parses the web to find the most relevant result available. Wolfram Alpha, by contrast, uses its own models to compute the answer using data curated from around the web.
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According to Wolfram Alpha's website, the service answers questions using "dynamic computations based on a vast collection of built-in data, algorithms and methods." Wolfram Alpha itself gathers data from a number of academic websites, including the Dow Jones, CrunchBase, and the United States Geological Survey.
This all means that you can now ask your Alexa device quantitative questions, the answers to which may not necessarily be available in other databases. You can try "Alexa, what is the billionth prime number?" or "Alexa, what is x to the power of three plus x plus five where x is equal to seven?"
The integration could be a big step forward for Amazon's voice assistant. Google Assistant is generally regarded as a smarter voice assistant than its longtime rival, but the one category in which Alexa has the upper hand is general knowledge. It's more accurate, and often provides context or cites a source in places where Google fails to do so.
And with the recent launch of Answer Update, which continuously augments and refines Alexa's knowledge base, it look like Alexa is gearing up to be a much smarter voice assistant in the coming year.
