Twilio Studio widgets not outputting ssml

Question

I am banging my head on this. Twilio Studio says it supports SSML using Amazon Polly voices on the say and gather widgets, https://www.twilio.com/docs/studio/widget-library/sayplay#ssml-support-for-polly-voices

I cannot make them work no matter what I try.

I tried using the examples from their docs, but nothing. What I currently have is this.

Twilio gather

I have also tried wraapping the whole block of text in valid ssml, using neural and non neural voices, single quoting, escaping. Nothing seems to work like the docs tell me it will.

When I look in the call log, the converted TWiML just strips all of the ssml. It looks like this

Twilio details

Any idea what I am doing wrong?

Answer 1

I figured this out in the end. The whole text block needed to be wrapped in <speak> </speak> block and the ampersands in the text needed to be removed.