Papers
14
Total Citations
448
H-Index
9
About
Catherine Watson’s research sits at the intersection of human-robot interaction, speech synthesis, and socially assistive robotics, with a particular focus on improving the quality of life for older adults. Her work has fundamentally shaped how robots communicate empathetically, demonstrating that the voice of a robot—its accent, emotional tone, and expressiveness—directly influences user trust and acceptance. Her landmark study on synthesized voice accents (102 citations) revealed that even subtle vocal traits alter how people perceive a robot’s competence and warmth. In a pioneering field trial at a retirement home (82 citations), she showed that a brief interaction with a robot could measurably improve residents’ attitudes and emotions, a finding that helped validate the potential of social robots in aged care. She also led the development of the first mobile service robot for older people (77 citations), focusing on intuitive, successful human-robot interaction. More recently, Watson has advanced artificial empathy through her work on emotional speech corpora and empathetic speech synthesis (53 and 40 citations), creating open-source tools that enable robots to detect and express emotions in speech. Her contributions have laid the groundwork for more natural, compassionate robotic companions in healthcare settings.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1The Effects of Synthesized Voice Accents on User Perceptions of Robots102 citations · 2011
- 2
- 3Deployment of a service robot to help older people77 citations · 2010
- 4Artificial Empathy in Social Robots: An analysis of Emotions in Speech53 citations · 2018
- 5Empathetic Speech Synthesis and Testing for Healthcare Robots40 citations · 2020
- 6
- 7Expressive facial speech synthesis on a robotic platform13 citations · 2009
- 8
- 9Towards expressive speech synthesis in english on a robotic platform12 citations · 2006
- 10