It would then be a trivially simple matter to tie this system into the shipwide comm network. The UT would relay the intent of the speaker to the comm system, which would then take care of relaying his voice when appropriate, and ignoring it when required.

And a brain-scanning, implanted UT would naturally be able to predict (to some degree) what a person was saying, with a second or two of advance warning before the intent became speech. That would be essential in translating, so that the device could change the word order in real time to match the grammar rules of the language it's translating into. Again, the comm system could easily tap into this function of the UT, and use it to predict whom the speaker wants to call.

This would solve the mystery of how "Riker to Picard" gets routed right in its entirety even though the identity of the receiver is revealed only at the end of the sentence. Thanks to the predictive UT, the comm system would *know* that Riker's next words would be "to Picard", so it would start piping Riker's words to Picard's comm badge straight from Riker's first deep inhalation, and not wait for the word "Picard".

Is there any comm discrepancy a mind-reading UT implant wouldn't solve? I think not. If we assume that standard UT implants aren't good at translating utterly unknown languages, and that the commbadge-based translator is needed in such situations, then this explains things like "Basics" and "Gravity" nicely - in those cases, the heroes made first contact with the aliens without the benefit of commbadges or shipboard computers, so the alien language was untranslatable. In other instances where the crew was deprived of their badges, they had already spoken with the aliens earlier and their implanted UTs could thus have been appropriately updated.

Whew! I guess that any comment on the comm systems or the UT will always be either a snide one-liner or then a miles-long rant like this. It's in the nature of the beast.

The idea of everyone in Starfleet needing implants just to function normally, does not fit my view of the enlightened 24th century human race (or what's left of that...).

"Picard to Commander Riker"

Using the internal sensors the Computer automatically detects Riker's location due to his Combadge. It then simply routes the message to the nearest interface panel to his location.

Or

It's a simple demonstration of basic wireless networking, the Communicator sends the message to his combadge, identified by a built in transponder, and a small in-built speaker relays the message.