[sapphireblue]

>Promising to deliver an AI that people could see as a friend is absolutely insane though. I don't see people being friends with something that couldn't complete the Turing Test

This is an interesting case. Turns out, given a creative approach it is possible to persuade a human that there is another human behind the screen. See ELIZA, "Turing tests". The methods are quite similar: constrain the domain and/or creatively manipulate human's expectations (e.g. the program that "passed" the Turing Test pretended to be a 13-year boy, so human jury tolerated its errors). The question is not how to fool humans but how to make such product non-trivially useful.

I think that the best approach currently available is applied in facebook M - use human workers to interact with customers while storing all interaction data and experimenting with training state of art ML models on it to eventually replace human workers.