[Emacspeak] Espeak speech rate and startup icon

[Harley Richardson <destructatron2018@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

     Hello,

First, I'm new here so I may as well introduce myself. I'm Harley and 
I'm only just starting to get into emacspeak and how cool it is, so the 
issue I'm having could be a me not knowing about how emacs works thing.

I am trying to have my espeak rate save across all sessions, however the 
setting isn't respected at all. The setting shows up in my .emacs once I 
save it for future sessions and save the buffer, but when emacs loads 
emacspeak the TTS server doesn't respect the rate setting. The same 
happens with the play audio icon at startup setting, even if it's off 
it'll still play. I'm using the latest version of emacspeak on Arch 
Linux via the AUR, and the emacspeak build on slackware slint 15 also 
has these issues. It's not an absolute deal breaker, but it's annoying 
having to set my speech rate every time I open it.

Thanks in advance.