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 active detection mechanism 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.