Allow muting a person only for me

[er008]

Sometimes I am in a meeting where one of the persons in the meeting is actually near me in the world outside the screen. In this case the sound is a bit maddening since there is a small delay between the sound from the person and the sound through the teams interface. In these cases, I would like to mute the person only for me since I am sitting near and can hear the person fine without headphones. Right now I need to takeoff headphones when the person is talking and putting it back as the person finishes talking.

[#2]

Created an account just to concur with this. I actually kept muting my co-worker who thought he was having an hardware issue because I thought it was obvious in a modern group call program that muting a person i just for the person who mutes. (If anything, I can't imagine many use cases for the currently implemented call-wide mute.)

We have hybrid meetings where some are connecting remotely and others are in the same room talking into a room mic. The people working locally are having a face-to-face meeting and remote workers can chime in through the call. If I could mute the room mic, I could listen the remote workers through my earbuds and local workers regularly in the room.

The current solution in our case has been broadcasting the call sound through one computer's speakers and using a room mic to record everyone in the room (while the rest of people who are in the meeting locally mute themselves), which has worked decently enough, but I suspect it's causing some feedback for the remote workers when the room mic picks up the speakers. It would be nice to hear the remote workers through earbuds though, especially when a larger meeting is happening.

[#3]

"Created an account just to concur with this." Same!

[#4]

@Julia_Cardoso 

Concurring here does little, instead visit Allow users to mute individuals but just from our point of view · Community (microsoft.com) and vote there.

[#5]

I strongly recommend implementing this feature as well, we switched from Discord to Teams at work for meetings and muting other people for myself is not negotiable. I even use noise cancelling headphones but I can still hear people in the same room. Hybrid office work with home office and in house presence is very common these days!

[#6]

+1, it's a really bad experience to be in the same room. and we all have good headsets.

[#7]

Yes, please add this feature! It is very frustrating, when one (or more) team participants is sitting right in front of you and you are hearing his voice with a slight delay.

[#8]

This feature exists in other voice apps, there's no reason why Teams shouldn't have it.  Like others have said, in a hybrid office/wfh environment it can get very annoying without having this option.

[#9]

This would be a fantastic addition to Teams. I know I have definitely been weirded out by having a colleague in the same room in the same meeting and hearing them twice.

[#10]

Yet another idea already enabled elsewhere. I work in a team where we hold a daily meeting - some of us are in the same physical space, and others are elsewhere. It makes sense to allow us all to remain un-muted in these meetings, while blocking each others audio.

I see two solutions and a workaround:
- Let us mute local audio from people we do not need to hear twice
- Allow us to define a group of people all in the same room that Teams just locally mutes
- Everyone uses Discord for voice chat because we can do this there

[#11]

Same issue here. Private mute would be very useful!

[#12]

Commenting to help this gain traction. Definite +1 for this

[#13]

 the feedback link doesn't work for me, it logs me in then it tells me "You have been blocked"

I cannot believe Microsoft needs three pages of arguments in this thread and still not read it nor understand why this feature is screaming obviously basic /facepalm

I will politely decline all Microsoft Teams invitations at work because of this. Jitsi Meet works just fine in desktops, iOS and Androids. No profiling, tracking and signups. 

@AdamZovits

[#14]

Here is a small and quick reproductible case, in case microsoft fails to understand why this is a basic feature and not special request:

Team mates A and B are the sole persons in the same room. They join the same Teams meeting. They don't have: a conference room, dedicated conference equipment, gaming level headphones. All they have is their laptops and their phones and headphones.

Mate A starts speaking.

At T0 moment of time, sound travels the room and reaches B ears.
At the same time, A's voice sound goes via the microphone to Teams conference servers, then returns to B headphones at T1=(T0+some miliseconds) moment of time.

Result: B hears A twice, at some sub-second delay. This creates a very difficult situation for B to focus on that A is talking because that's how human ears work.

The only terrible workaround for B is to mute own speaker/headset altogether while A is speaking, then immediately release the mute as A stops speaking, potentially missing what others in the conference might say.

No, going to separate offices is not possible

No, using noise cancellation headsets are not available.

No, conference equipment is not available in the room.

The simple solution in Jitsi Meet is B hovers the mouse over A icon in the meeting, a sound volume slide appears and slides it down to zero. This way, B only hears A via the local physical presence, while still listens and speaks clearly to the meeting.

[#15]

As it's a local 'thing', where you're just muting the audio from a specific user/s on your own application for that specific meeting (I assume), this could be a simple application-level feature that didn't hit the servers at all.
So, an easy fix, most likely.

[#16]

@g4nzg 

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."

[#17]

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.

[#18]

In hybrid offices, this is an extremely important feature. It's remarkable, that Teams does not allow this.

[#19]

This is a completely basic feature which voice and conference programs had figured out and had availible as an option around 2001-2003. It's a joke that Microsoft still hasnt implemented this

[#20]

wow so according to that explanation, MS Teams is _FUNDAMENTALLY_ broken by design...

[#21]

100% agree - I very commonly will join a meeting with someone who is in the same room as me (we are both in the same meeting) and it would be incredibly useful if I could mute the person in the room with me because I can hear them (and hearing them through Teams is just an obnoxious echo).