In the near future people will be surrounded by intelligent devices embedded in everyday objects where the knowledge and understanding of device attributes and capabilities will be a key enabler. This paper describes the current state of our research in designing distributed knowledge based devices as a solution to adapt spoken dialogue systems within ambient intelligence. In this context a spoken dialogue system is a computational entity that allows universal access to ambient intelligence for anyone, anywhere, at anytime to use any device through any media. Our aim is to build knowledge-based devices to enable dynamic adaptation of the components integrated in the dialogue system architecture. An example focusing household appliances is depicted.