Since this is probably going to happen anyways, (Due to the comms tent being turned into a place,) why not have a contraption that allows you to set it to "Call" another room in the same place, so that when you use the chat, you are heard in that particular room rather than the one you're in. (If there is no chat in the particular room, a single line chat room will be added.)

But why not take that a little further. Two additional suggestions: One: Either have two additional contraptions of this type that would allow you to call rooms in other places or outposts, or make it so that contraption could do both of those, and Two: Have the ability to customize what you have before your speech normally.

For the second one, have you noticed when you type something in chat without a colon, it almost always has "says " before it? In some places like the Failboat and the Comms Tent, it is changed to "mutters" and "projects" respectively. With the second feature, if this is added, it will allow you to customize that. (Either with a type it in the box option or from a set of options.)

A couple of variations of this idea would be to have it be a feature that can be added with SP, or have there be a fee like that of the Comms Tent to use the telephones, (Which will go to the owner of the dwelling.) Or maybe have the second and the option to turn the fee off using SP. Maybe it only takes SP to do this for other dwellings/outposts, or maybe it would work like the teleportation beacon for those two, people would pay in cigarettes to keep those two features running for the entire dwelling.

Some examples of where this would be useful:
Let's say you've got a room with a separate observation deck. Let's say there's a microphone or other device that allows people on the observation deck to talk to those in the room. Let's say that you don't want people switching from the observation deck to the room at will, even with a few doors to both the observation deck and the room. To do that without this contraption, you'd need: 1 room, at least 1 page, (For the observation deck, when you're using the microphone,) 2 programs, (One to determine if you entered the observation deck and one to determine if you entered the room,) and that's about it. But as for the number of contrivances contraptions, you'd need: One previous room and Hide Door for each door you add to that room, one Show Page, and one Pass Through. With this, you'd only need two rooms (One observation deck, one room), a page for the observation deck, and the "Telephone" contraption, and you'd be all set! That, and you don't have to spend 50 SP every time you want to add a door to either room past the normal maximum of three. (Determined by the program.)

Basically, the simplified version of that example: It takes less work to have an observation deck with a microphone that allows you to converse with the people in the room below with this contraption, especially if there's lots of doors to either or both rooms. Just add a page to the observation room (As opposed to having the observation room be part of the room) with this contraption in it, linked to the room.

The second example would be: Let's say you have a room of your dwelling that is designed to look like it's part of an actual outpost. You could use this contraption/variant of the contraption to actually be able to talk to the people there. Same thing goes if you happen to have a comms tent in your dwelling, only this time the contraption is in the program for a page instead of a room.

The third example would be: Let's say you have a room with loud music. Logically, people wouldn't be saying stuff, they'd be yelling so that you can hear them. Just add a program with this contraption linking to the same room the program's in, and customize the chat option to "yells". Or, on a similar note, let's say there's a horrible sleeping monster nearby. Logically, you wouldn't want to wake it up, so you'd do the same thing, only with the chat option set to "whispers".

So what do you think?

It took me a few times reading through this to totally understand all the things you were trying to say, which always bodes ill for feature suggestions. I do love the thought and enthusiasm though.

Re. your suggestion for people to have what are essentially customizable, personal comms tents for their Places -- I think within a Place, shared chat spaces already take care of this problem. (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.) For Place-to-Place communication, I don't.. think this is necessary. People can scoot off to chat in the other Place.

Re. your suggestion about having customizable /says lines for Places: I forget whether we have a C/C for this already, probably not, but the functionality already exists in Clans, so it can probably be easily made into one. I don't know why you'd bother when people can just use the colon strategy (presumably there will not always be loud music on, presumably the monster will not always be sleeping), but I think it'd be relatively easy to implement if there were an outcry for it.