Allow muting a person only for me

This missing feature impacts hybrid teams every single day. When I’m in the office and sitting right next to a colleague who is also in the same online meeting, I hear their voice twice — once in person and again through Teams with a delay. It makes it extremely distracting to follow the discussion.

We still need a way to mute only the output of specific participants locally, without muting them for everyone else. Other collaboration platforms already offer this, and with hybrid work becoming the norm, this is no longer a “nice to have” — it’s essential for productivity. Please prioritize adding this capability.

My understanding is that the audio stream is generated server-side, so here is a suggestion of what could be done: Have some sort of MuttingSettings read from each participant in a meeting, and generate the correspondant stream, according to how many different settings there are. So for instance, if there are basically two teams, one at BuildingA and another one at BuildingB, the team at BuildingA would mute each other, generating a stream with the audio from participants from BuildingB, and vice-verse. This would increase the demand server-side, but possibly not that much, as similar settings could be collapsed together.