# Enhancing Human-Agent Interaction via Artificial Agents That Speculate About the Future
## 5 Discussion
### Implications  
#### 5.2.1 Design Implications for Artificial Conversational Agents  
There are a number of implications from this research for both designing artificial conversational agents and thinking about their use in real-world in-home environments. For instance, in this study, we saw that alterations in the speech system of such agents can have differing effects across languages, aligning with results seen in other studies [57; 61]. This is critical to consider in the modern world, where multi-cultural and multi-lingual environments are increasingly common [8; 66; 67]. In short, a CUI designed for a multi-cultural and/or multi-lingual environment may need to be designed differently from a more homogenous monolingual one. We can extend the above point more broadly to think about how context affects interactions with conversational agents, which is unfortunately too often overlooked [68]. Such a context may involve culture and linguistic setting, but also a human's functional role at the current moment. For instance, at work, we may serve one role (e.g., bank teller, nurse, professor), while serving a different role at home (e.g., parent, caregiver, spouse). The exact same person can behave (and communicate) in very different ways depending on the context and their role within it. Moreover, those contexts can change depending on our location and/or who else is present at the time. This demands that we consider _the socially situated context_ within which an interaction takes place [67]. For conversational studies, such as the one we conducted here, the above will likely necessitate coming up with some way to disentangle the lexical aspects of a language itself (i.e., the words used) from the cultural influences that shape how individual native speakers express themselves through those words. Those lexical aspects are, of course, rooted in the historical development of the language, developing alongside the culture over time. Meanwhile, culture influences how individuals behave/speak in the present, which may diverge from the historical lexicon for various reasons [7]. For example, think of the difference between the standard meaning of a word and its use as slang, e.g., the word \"snack\" in modern American English (referring to an attractive person, rather than food). Disentangling the two will be no easy feat and likely require a very sophisticated study design. One possibility may be to take advantage of slang meanings that diverge from standard meanings to investigate _socially situated context_ effects on conversations between humans and robots/agents, though how to do so cross-linguistically via experiments will be a challenge. Another design aspect is to think about the technological context. In short, the conversational agent (or the device it is speaking through) is never going to be the only technology in the room. Indeed, with the growth of internet-of-things (IOT) systems in homes and workplaces, humans are increasingly living in a \"world of devices\" [69]. One thing to consider is how a conversational agent on some specific device can interface with other devices in the environment or leverage data coming off such devices. For example, in a healthcare setting, there may be many digital health devices present (e.g., wearables), which could all provide a different perspective on the patient's status through different sensing capabilities [70]. That may allow the conversational agent to autonomously alter its dialogue in ways that better assist a patient, taking into account linguistic differences in how individuals express their physical/mental state or incorporating \"speech biomarkers\" from the conversation itself [22]. Or take a different scenario. Imagine a conversational physical robot that could \"transform\" into an artificial agent and appear on a digital screen elsewhere in a person's home in order to continue communication--or even transfer to a digital screen in the person's vehicle when they leave home.