Yes, that is one of its intended uses.
Putting brackets around a variable name does not make for a valid token.
Press F1 while VoiceAttack has focus to open VoiceAttackHelp.pdf in your default PDF viewer, which contains information on VoiceAttack's features, and have a look at the "Text (and Text-To-Speech) Tokens" section.
This topic may also be of use, in addition to the official documentation:
Variables and tokens summed up