A central control and management station (10) is provided for automatically creating, loading, modifying and/or checking recorded audio announcements at a plurality of remotely located playback devices (20) of a plurality of vendors in a telecommunications network. The station (10) includes a library of voice files (13), an access database (18) containing machine identification details and access instructions for each of the remotely located playback devices (20), a management unit (11) for receiving requests from vendors to load or modify recorded announcements in the playback devices (20) and a control unit (12) which sends the recorded announcements via loading interfaces (17) to the playback devices (20). The station (10) includes or is connected to a text to speech converter (15) and/or a digital voice recording station (30) for creating new announcements so that if a requested announcement is not present in the voice files (13) the management unit (11) can automatically request the creation of a new announcement. The station (10) also includes a voice recognizer (19) for verifying that a recorded announcement has been correctly loaded in a playback device (20).