We use Baidu's TTS (text-to-speech) engine to deliver high-quality, natural sounding audio for all of our words and example sentences. 

Synthesized audio is not as good as native audio from human speakers. However, there are several advantages:

• Every word (115,000+) in our dictionary and every sentence (~12,000 and growing every day) has audio right away, without waiting for hundreds of hours of studio recording time to complete.
• You can customize the audio to accommodate beginners (with slower pronunciation), or advanced students (with faster than normal pronunciation). 
• You can change the voice gender, allowing you to emulate your own gender and sound more natural.
• As Baidu's speech engine improves each year, you'll get the benefits immediately.

Having said that, TTS is not a panacea. Occasionally (in about 1/1000th of the words), the pronunciation isn't perfect. If we know about these, we can usually correct them, so let us know if you hear something strange!

Heads up! We expect to kick off a project to introduce native audio starting in summer of 2021!