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I think it's a near-certainty that sentient life is out there (and plentiful), and it's possible that we may even receive signals from a distant civilisation on an exoplanet one day, but carrying on a conversation may be difficult with any civilisation that is more than a few light years from Earth.
Recent evidence shows that stars with one or more planets are the norm rather than the exception, and planets in the "habitable zone" are proving to be quite common. We are also expanding our ideas about how big the "habitable zone" is - e.g. not very long ago, the Earth was the only planet in our solar system that was considered to be in the habitable zone, but we now know that Europa and Enceladus have oceans of liquid water. This means that there are literally hundreds of billions of planets or moons in the Milky Way alone which lie within the habitable zone as we currently understand it, and there are of course hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe.
As for the Drake Equation - with so many candidate planets and moons, regardless of how low you rate the probability of life forming on any given planet, and how low you rate the probability of life evolving to some sort of sentient civilisation, that still suggests millions of candidate planets in our Milky Way - all we have to do is find them!
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