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What is a good way to communicate audio information. Listening to audio doesn't necessarily explain how the sound was made (well it does kind of), whereas seeing a word in IPA makes it easy to reproduce (for people familiar with IPA) and compare.

English writing is not a good phonetic system for representing speech even for the English language: IMO a 1-to-1 mapping between pronunciation and spelling should be the goal.

You might want to explain how to pronounce the word in a British or Australian accent or compare it to how a word was pronounced 200 years ago. In that case you can use a phonetic alphabet to show the difference.

The idea is to have a writing system which can be used to accurately record all possible sounds. It's helpful for learning languages with bad alphabets such as English (https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/teaching-pronunci...), for describing accents and for comparing languages and linguistics work.

PS: I don't know IPA so I'm probably wrong about everything.