But running an application like the assistant remotely would produce an unusable service, Mundie said. The assistant must respond to people relatively quickly. "That's not likely to be computed in real time if you interpose the latency of a wide area network in the middle of it," he said.

While the digital assistant demo was based on real technology, Mundie showed another demo of a vision for the future that might be possible when applying his vision for computers that anticipate users' needs.