A group of five manufacturers is hoping for a paradigm shift in the way that voice mail is used: the group – comprising Lucent Technologies Inc, Centigram Communications, Northern Telecom Ltd, Octel Communications and Siemens Rolm Communications – wants to follow the electronic mail model more closely, so that rather than dialing a telephone number and leaving a spoken electronic mail message, users instead originate a spoken message at their desktop, and then transmit it over the Internet to its intended recipient. To achieve this, the group has agreed to adopt a new interoperability protocol, Voice Profile for Internet Mail or VPIM, which is being developed under the auspices of the US Electronic Messaging Association. The group wants other voice mail vendors to come on board, in the hope that Voice Profile can be established as a de facto industry standard. Voice Profile is itself based on the Simple Message Transfer Protocol and the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions standard. Its development grew out of work on the AMIS-D protocol, conducted within the UMIG Universal Messaging Interoperability Group: when this disbanded at the end of 1994, companies developing the specification reconvened through the Electronic Messaging Association. For the future, the group also wants to extend the interoperability protocol to other types of messaging, including facsimile and videomail. The Voice Profile specification has been published as a Request for Comment, and can be downloaded from the World Wide Web at ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1911.txt. If adoption and usage of the Voice Profile specification takes off in the way the five partners hope it will, it could cause more problems for those smaller telecommunications carriers that are already protesting about Internet telephony (CI No 2,867). The Voice Profile group denies that it will come into conflict with carriers, saying that there is a big distinction between real-time voice communications as used by Internet telephony software, and the store-and-forward techniques of voice mail. However, for carriers seeing yet another erosion of their monopoly on voice services, that distinction may prove rather smaller.