The hardware didn't sound like anything too special to me; especially with it only needing to handle audio. Fitting enough processing power to handle realtime "AI" in a package that size is the only thing jumping out at me. I'm sure they would be planning to offload that work to some 'cloud' to crunch though. (I personally dislike functionless, network-dependent hardware, but everybody seems to be doing it...)
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, which will likely stand for at least another decade. Speech recognition and synthesis are in fairly good places, but not human interaction that isn't transparently shallow.