disclosed is a method and apparatus for dynamically adjusting the playout delay for audio signals , which mainly includes three parts of dynamic adjustment , i . e ., playout delay , silence length , and jitter buffer size . in the invention , the time for playout delay is real - time adjusted according to the probability distribution of the number of packets buffered in a jitter buffer . a voice detection is taken to detect silence within a voice packet . by dynamically adjusting the silence length in the voice packets , the present invention reduces the network variation impact on the voice quality . it also overcomes the drawback of conventional techniques for estimating playout delay , and reduces the whole computation complexity of the playout delay for the voice packets .