I was at a hackathon recently and I won the best use of wolfram technologies prize. I basically made a texting service, and one of the features that I implemented was the ability to ask questions, which the service would then answer by querying wolfram alpha. I kinda don't want to post the number here cause it'll cost me a lot of money if it gets out, but it was pretty cool.

I used the Wolfram Alpha API, Google App Engine as a backend (with Python), and Twilio as the SMS API.

![Here's a picture of a sample question message that queried Wolfram Alpha][1]

Update:

Here's some code that y'all might find interesting:

1. This is a class that searches for queries on wolfram alpha. Basically you create a wolfram class and pass in your ID and then you can call search on a query.

   import urllib2
   import urllib
   import httplib
   from xml.etree import ElementTree as etree
   import sys
   
   class wolfram(object):
       def __init__(self, appid):
           self.appid = appid
           self.base_url = 'http://api.wolframalpha.com/v2/query?'
           self.headers = {'User-Agent':None}
   
       def _get_xml(self, ip):
           url_params = {'input':ip, 'appid':self.appid}
           data = urllib.urlencode(url_params)
           req = urllib2.Request(self.base_url, data, self.headers)
           xml = urllib2.urlopen(req).read()
           return xml
   
       def _xmlparser(self, xml):
           data_dics = {}
           tree = etree.fromstring(xml)
           #retrieving every tag with label 'plaintext'
           for e in tree.findall('pod'):
               for item in [ef for ef in list(e) if ef.tag=='subpod']:
                   for it in [i for i in list(item) if i.tag=='plaintext']:
                       if it.tag=='plaintext':
                           data_dics[e.get('title')] = it.text
           return data_dics
   
       def search(self, ip):
           xml = self._get_xml(ip)
           result_dics = self._xmlparser(xml)
           for key, value in result_dics.iteritems(): 
               val = result_dics[key]
               try: 
                   result_dics[key] = val.encode('ascii', 'ignore')
               except Exception: 
                   pass 
           valList = result_dics.values()
           keyList = result_dics.keys()
           if 'Result' in result_dics.keys():
               return result_dics['Result']
           elif 'Response' in result_dics.keys():
               return result_dics['Response']
           elif self.checkForString('Weather forecast for', result_dics):
               return result_dics[keyList[self.getIndexOfString('Weather forecast for', result_dics)]]
           elif self.checkForString('Results', result_dics):
               return result_dics[keyList[self.getIndexOfString('Results', result_dics)]]
           elif self.checkForString('Corporate', result_dics):
               return result_dics[keyList[self.getIndexOfString('Corporate', result_dics)]]
           elif self.checkForString('Basic', result_dics):
               return result_dics[keyList[self.getIndexOfString('Basic', result_dics)]]
           elif self.checkForString('IP address', result_dics):
               return result_dics[keyList[self.getIndexOfString('IP address', result_dics)]]
           elif self.checkForString('date', result_dics):
               return result_dics[keyList[self.getIndexOfString('date', result_dics)]]
           else: 
               return "I don't understand. Sorry! Type COMMANDS to see the list of available commands."
   
       def checkForString(self, checkStr, myDict):
           keyList = myDict.keys()
           for key in keyList:
               if checkStr in key: 
                   return True
           return False
   
       def getIndexOfString(self, checkStr, myDict):
           keyList = myDict.keys()
           for x in range(len(keyList)):
                   if checkStr in keyList[x]: 
                       return x 
   

2. twilio_resp = twilio.twiml.Response()    
   twilio_resp.sms(reply)
   self.response.out.write(str(twilio_resp) + "\n")
   

(reply is the string that is you query from Wolfram Alpha)