I did a report during my undergrad (2005) on AI chatterbots and compared various bots; they all had huge distances to go before approaching any kind of real con

I did a report during my undergrad (2005) on AI chatterbots and compared various bots; they all had huge distances to go before approaching any kind of real conversation. During my masters (2009) I studied computational linguistics and found that the gap was even wider than I'd previously thought. Even generating a natural sounding 2 sentence exchange is very difficult, let alone a lengthy conversation, and as far as anything approaching genuine understanding and insight? We don't even know where to begin yet.