Gokul Gopalakris brings up an annoyance I’ve run into on more than one occasion: the inability to easily silence someone on a conference call. Anything from people whom shouldn’t be speaking to someone whom insists on joining a call while driving somewhere can be dealt with–if you can get a human involved. There has to be a better way.

There are several problems that

would need to be resolved with such a system. Let’s assume you could press a key and mute the person speaking. How can you restrict that capability? How do you give that capability to others? How do you take it away? How do you undo the muting? Of course, there’s also the “whom do you mute when multiple parties are speaking” question too.

It boils down to the simple fact that most telephone handsets are limited to 12 buttons. The handset interface just isn’t rich enough to pull off what Gokul is asking for, though I will admit I agree in principle. What do you think? Share your feedback in the comments.