What does the Unicode System do?

The Unicode System plays a crucial role in representing text in a consistent manner across different systems and platforms. It standardizes character encoding so that characters such as letters, numbers, symbols, and even emojis can be represented universally. This is particularly important in a global context where different languages and scripts exist. By assigning a unique code to every character, Unicode ensures that text appears the same regardless of the device or software being used, thus eliminating issues of misrepresentation that can occur with varying encoding systems.

The other choices do not accurately describe the function of the Unicode System. Compression of files for storage pertains to data management and file systems, audio signal processing relates to sound engineering, and converting characters to uppercase deals with text formatting, none of which align with the primary purpose of character encoding that Unicode addresses.