Forum Discussion
Allow muting a person only for me
This is a feature which I see will be more useful as parts of the workforce start returning to the office and parts continue working remotely. People in the office will always be using their desk stations to join Teams meetings due to the need for sharing personal work content, often with other office people mixed with remote people so the effect of hearing office voices both live and through Teams will become more of an annoyance.
I also imagine that the way Teams takes multiple input streams of audio and video and combines them into a single stream of mixed audio and video to multiple participants is the main stumbling block to implementing this feature. It would need the Teams server to also have the ability to customise the mixed audio output stream for each participant, so instead of a single mixed stream there would potentially be as many output streams as there are participants in the Teams meeting.
Regardless, it would be an awesome feature enhancement if Microsoft could get it working.
So, an easy fix, most likely.
Sadly it's not that simple, see Ed's comment (if, for some reason you didn't read the rest of the thread you're replying to):
"You seem to think that you are receiving individual audio feeds for all the people in a conference, you aren't. They are combined in the conference bridge in the cloud. Which is why person to person Teams calls stay on your network, but any time that you have 3 or more people, it uses a Teams conference bridge.
You only get one audio feed. You also get a suggestion of who is talking, from the ring around the user coming on, but you can see that it is far from perfect. The conference bridge mixes the audio, it doesn't switch it, so you can have 5 people with their rings on at one time."- wow so according to that explanation, MS Teams is _FUNDAMENTALLY_ broken by design...
- Yes, I'd seen that latterly. It seems like a bit of a design fubar, although having done this stuff myself, I know that you can't wargame every eventuality, so always end up working around initial design decisions that made perfect sense at the time. In this case, it doesn't seem so easy as now you have to implement some kind of per-user audio trunking preference at the bridge. That will be fun. However, some kind of per-user audio muting is going to have to be done.
Left-field: I wonder if the noise cancelling feature of the/a microphone can be used in some way to limit the level of local audio? There's a few milliseconds to play with. All you need is a microphone (doesn't have to be the same one as on the headset) feeding ambient into the application and suppressing corrolated audio. The functionality is already there, although outbound only.
