Dertouzos is one of the more pragmatic of the information-age prophets. He disdains conventional user-interface specialists and their petty improvements, but he does not expect nor desire such radical innovations as implanted brain chips or even intelligent agents to achieve any sort of popularity. There will be much more collaboration, but no utopian cyberspace. The people, families, companies and nations of the future will continue to do the same things they've always done. They'll simply do them faster and better.
Oxygen operates across a variety of devices.
With it, Dertouzos is able to order tickets for a weekend trip to Europe just by carrying on a short, plain-language dialogue with the system via a custom handheld information appliance. Oxygen is just one prototype. Machines will recognize natural speech, but they will present information to us visually. They'll present us with personalized resources for each task. And online software will replace shrink-wrapped programs, allowing users to access their data from any device in the world.