I use WEIRD, my completely untested and I researched intuition being that knowing common consonants are in a word isn’t helpful unless you get the right place, but knowing the vowels is. At least that was my logic when I first played and my brain produced WEIRD.

I’m sure it’s far from optimal, but I continue to use it because I obviously understand how I came to choose it, and it “works” and survivor bias is powerful :)

I recall seeing HN posts from people working out “optimal” starting words and guess patterns, but I just like mine :)

I use ADIEU to get 4 wovels, likely the same reason you picked AUDIO.

SLATE/ROUND/PICKY has been a 8/8 for getting the correct word on the 4th guess since I started using it.