I'm trying to use play_and_get_digits with mod_ssml to speak an SSML string while listening for DTMF tones. However, I seem to be having an issue with how to escape the playback string. If I execute:

<action application="play_and_get_digits" data="0 1 1 5000 # silence_stream://5000 silence_stream://250 digits" />

Everything works great, but if I instead do

<action application="play_and_get_digits" data="0 1 1 5000 # ssml://<speak>Hello there</speak> silence_stream://250 digits" />

I hear the audio and FS collects the digits, but it doesn't assign the dialplan variable. I can only assume that this is a result of the space in the "Hello there" string, but I can't figure out how to properly escape it (wrapping in single quotes doesn't seem to work, setting a channel variable and using that doesn't seem to work).

Am I missing something obvious here? Tried to search the documentation for escaping dialplan variables but didn't find anything.

Thanks,
Colin