[Emacspeak] Question about setting default speech rate

[Greg Wocher <gtwocher@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello all,
I was able to get emacspeak up and running on my arch installation. I never could get it to work on Fedora 44. I am running into an issue though. I cannot set the default speech rate in my init.el file. No matter how I type the command it does not work. I am using emacs 31.1 which might be part of the issue but I am not sure. What can I do to set the default rate?

THanks,
Greg WOcher