If such artificial "friends" are a click away to mobile phone users, this will increase the loneliness, the "cocooning" of many people and reduce real social interactions. It could change society a lot. And it doesn´t matter if the emotions of those AI-friends are faked or not, because they will mimic real ones well enough.
Good for the elites who just want to have an army of not-thinking wage slaves, but not people who sit together and talk with each other.
I agree. The social distancing guidelines have pushed this technology forward. It even offers digital full size assistants in virtually anything you can imagine.