There is actually a useful tool inside Wolfram Alpha, Mencius Moldbug notes, but exposing it would require Stephen Wolfram to amputate what he thinks is the beautiful part of the system, and leave what he thinks is the boring part:
WA is two things: a set of specialized, hand-built databases and data visualization apps, each of which would be cool, the set of which almost deserves the hype; and an intelligent UI, which translates an unstructured natural-language query into a call to one of these tools. The apps are useful and fine and good. The natural-language UI is a monstrous encumbrance, which needs to be taken out back and shot. It won’t be.
[...]
When you use WA, you know which of these tools you wish to select. You know that when you type “two cups of flour and two eggs” (which now works) you are looking for a Nutrition Facts label. It is only Stephen Wolfram’s giant electronic brain which has to run ten million lines of code to figure this out. Inside your own brain, it is written on glowing letters across your forehead.So the giant electronic brain is doing an enormous amount of work to discern information which the user knows and can enter easily: which tool she wants to use.
When the giant electronic brain succeeds in this task, it has saved the user from having to manually select and indicate her actual data-visualization application of choice. This has perhaps saved her some time. How much? Um, not very much.
When the giant electronic brain fails in this task, you type in Grandma’s fried-chicken recipe and get a beautiful 3-D animation of a bird-flu epidemic. (Or, more likely, “Wolfram Alpha wasn’t sure what to do with your input.” Thanks, Wolfram Alpha!) How do you get from this to your Nutrition Facts? Rearrange some words, try again, bang your head on the desk, give up. What we’re looking at here is a classic, old-school, big steaming lump of UI catastrophe.
And does the giant electronic brain fail? Gosh, apparently it does. After many years of research, WA is nowhere near achieving routine accuracy in guessing the tool you want to use from your unstructured natural-language input. No surprise. Not only is the Turing test kinda hard, even an actual human intelligence would have a tough time achieving reliability on this task.
The task of “guess the application I want to use” is actually not even in the domain of artificial intelligence. AI is normally defined by the human standard. To work properly as a control interface, Wolfram’s guessing algorithm actually requires divine intelligence. It is not sufficient for it to just think. It must actually read the user’s mind. God can do this, but software can’t.