A British company has come up with a system that will write documents dictated over the te

lephone, using speech recognition technology, and then E-mail the completed document back to the user. The Speech Machine's system can be dialed up from any touch-tone telephone. Users simply speak their letter, report, memorandum or other document into the phone, where it is picked up by computer, which writes it into a file. A human operator, checks the completed text for errors before being sent to the user's E-mail box, usually within three hours or by the next working day.

Behind the success of the product, which was used to write this article, lies military technology. Traditionally, speech recognition systems have been limited in use because they must be treated with care and dictated to slowly with no interfering background noise. In addition, previous systems have had to get accustomed to the voice of an individual user. The Speech Machine's system can operate in high-noise environments and will usually recognize voices immediately. Features like this were developed by the Defense Research Agency.

Users must dictate punctuation marks, such as "comma" and "new paragraph" which the system recognizes as such rather than writing the exact words. The finished document can also be faxed to clients or to the user's base office. The benefit of the service is that it requires no extra training for users. Many professionals already know how to dictate documents because they do it all the time. Using the Net, the clients and typists can be anywhere in the world and the service will run 24 hours a day.

According to the passage, the Speech Machine's system was developed by ______.

A．the telephone office

B．a British company

C．the Defense Research Agency

D．the military service