How do I set the timezone of my Amazon Echo to outside the US?

Trying to update your Amazon Echo to your local timezone? Here’s a quick and simple way to do it using Chrome Developer Tools and cURL.

Here’s hoping one day soon the Echo will be global!

I previously had a guide to using the Amazon Echo from Australia which detailed everything from where to purchase it to how to change the location and timezone. In order to change the timezone and such, we needed to spot the request by the Alexa web app and then re-send it using Request Maker. I then found a way using cURL… however, it appears for a range of countries — including Australia — you no longer need to even do that!

Setting up your Echo to a non-US/non-UK address and timezone (The new, new way in 2017!)

Update as of 30/11/2017: They’ve added a new dropdown list which can be worked around. I’ve updated the steps below to show a new method. Not sure which countries are supported at the moment, so let me know if yours works!

Try setting up your Echo to a local address and timezone by:

Going to alexa.amazon.com and clicking Settings > Find your device under “Alexa Devices” (it should be right up the top):

Finding your Echo’s settings

You can now set up your Echo to an Australian address and timezone just by:

Going to alexa.amazon.com and clicking Settings > Find your device under “Alexa Devices” (it should be right up the top):

Finding your Echo’s settings

From there, scroll to “Device location” underneath “General” and click “Edit”:

Editing our location

Then, right click on the country dropdown and choose “Inspect” (this is on Google Chrome, on Firefox it is “Inspect Element”):

Inspecting the country dropdown

Click the arrow next to the code that starts with <select id=”data-device-address-country” to expand it:

Expanding the select field

Find the first country code value there (at the time of writing it is “AS” for American Samoa). Double click that value:

Editing the AS value

Change it to the country code you would like (e.g. “AU”) and then hit the Enter key:

Changing it to the country code we want

Double click the name next to it and change that to your country name (you don’t need to do this for it to work… you could just change the country code and remember which of the countries you changed… but this is neater!). Then hit the Enter key again:

Changing the country name too

We’ll now have an updated dropdown which lets us choose our country! Take note that this is only temporary — if you refresh the page, it will go back to normal, so don’t refresh the page yet!

We now have Australia in the dropdown menu!

Choose your new country and then enter in your address below it. Then hit “Save”!

Entering the rest of the address

It should successfully save your new address! Feel free to close the developer tools with the X on the bottom right.

A successful address update!

When successful, I receive this message:

Please check any existing alarms to make sure they match the desired times after changing your address or time zone.

If you see that message, it appears to have updated everything successfully! EASY!

We can also change our timezone using the options underneath there (no developer tools or fanciness required!)

Changing your timezone too

To test it out, ask it things such as:

• “Alexa, what’s the time?”
• “Alexa, where am I?”

What used to happen with the address?

Previously, adding in a local address that is outside of the US or UK did not work and you’d receive this error:

“Could not set your address. Please ensure you have correctly entered a complete address.”

Below is all the madness we used to worry about, if you’ve got the address updating successfully — let me know! Once it seems that everyone has it sorted and it’s working for a range of countries, I’ll remove the below madness 🙂

Remember… if your Echo is working now, you don’t need to worry about any of the below. It’s here in case some people still can’t update their Echo and wonder why. If you are in this boat, let me know too. I’m hoping to work out whether this is a global change or whether some of us are okay and others aren’t.

The old way (SHOULDN’T BE NEEDED ANYMORE!)

Since my earlier article, it appears something may have changed in either the Amazon Echo web app or Request Maker, as the requests do not appear as they used to. I decided to find another way to do this and stumbled upon using the Chrome Developer Tools and cURL.

CAUTION: There has been at least one case of someone no longer being able to use their Echo after attempting to make this work. If you do some of the steps below incorrectly, or if Amazon changes something, there’s every chance you can stop your Echo working. Be cautious. Most recently, it appears Amazon may be blocking this setting change altogether… so this may no longer work for you. Let us know how you go with it!

Important Update! It now appears that only the timezone of your Echo can be changed to one outside of the US. Changing your whole address for other functionality no longer works as the Echo filters addresses to only allow ones in the UK or US. I will update my two Amazon Echo posts if I come across a way to get it working again but because this is on Amazon’s server end… it might be tough! We may have to wait until the Echo goes more global, which I hope will happen soon! If you end up getting the “User-entered device address and validated device address are not consistent; address will not be saved” error — that is the reason why, it’s not you doing anything wrong on your end!

What this means is — This method no longer works for most people if you are trying to update your address. You can no longer set your address to be one outside of the US/UK. The only way that seems to work is changing the timezone at alexa.amazon.com’s settings as per the instructions on “The new way in 2017!”. If you decide to go ahead and give the cURL method a go anyway and it happens to work again at some point in the future, let me know in the comments 🙂

If you are game to try it anyway, here are the old steps to setting your local address —

Setting an initial US address

Go to alexa.amazon.com and click Settings > Find your device under “Alexa Devices” (it should be right up the top):

Accessing your Echo’s settings page

In the page that appears, find your “Device location” setting and click “Edit”:

The edit button for your device location

Open up Chrome Developer Tools using either:

• The Chrome menu, Tools > Developer Tools.
• Ctrl+Shift+I on Windows.
• Cmd+Opt+I on Mac.

Go to the Network tab and type in “device-preferences” to filter out any HTTP requests happening that we don’t need. At the time of writing, there’s a tonne of analytics requests that stream through too.

Filtering to just requests with device-preferences in their URL

Add in a sample address. Choose one in an American suburb you might want to find out local information for, as this will be your default address for all the things we can’t trick the Echo to give us locally:

Choosing a US address for the Echo

One you’ve typed in an address and selected it, you should see two HTTP requests come through in the developer tools (the second one takes a bit of time to pop up). Click on the second request:

Choosing the second request that appears

If you scroll through the contents of this request, you should see info about location and address, such as deviceAddressModel, this is good! This means you have the right request.

Checking if you have the right request

Right-click the name of that request and choose “Copy as cURL”.

Copying that request into cURL data

Paste that data into your favourite plain text or code editor like Notepad, Sublime Text, Notepad++… etc (not Microsoft Word or TextEdit!). This is the whole request represented in a cURL command that you’ll be able to run again with new values once you’ve changed them here in the text editor.

If you scroll down to the bottom of that cURL request, you will see a JSON string that starts with {"deviceAccountId" and ends with "isSaveInFlight":true}. This is the data you will want to adjust. Each value will be in a key/value pair such as "timeZoneId":"Australia/Sydney". (Though, my timeZoneId by default when I ran through these steps was actually null.)

You will be updating the following (but not all at once!):

• timeZoneId – You can find your timezone in this list. Mine was "Australia/Sydney". This is the main one you can change to solve many of the clock issues. Make sure you keep the capitalization exactly the same as in this list, copy paste it exactly as it is there.
• city
• countryCode
• county
• district
• houseNumber
• postalCode
• state
• street
• postalCode (there are two)
• temperatureScale (I changed mine to CELSIUS)

You’ll be keeping label as is. Previously, Amazon had some sort of backend check for this one that returned a 400 error every time I edited it. Most recently, it hasn’t returned an error when the label was changed, but I do not think it actually refers to it either.

Keep deviceAccountId, searchCustomerId and so on the same — these are unique to you!

The Magic Order!

This is section is an update made on 8th July 2016, thanks to Tony Vid in the comments of my other Echo article.

In order to have everything save correctly on your Echo, Tony found an order which might ensure everything does actually switch over to your local timezone. It has worked for me and others

Important: Do not change the label value at any point!

Firstly, set your timeZoneId, leave everything else as is and then send that cURL request (there are instructions on how to send that below if you aren’t sure)

Then, add the following to your request (keep the timeZoneId changed, each step builds on the last):

1. Set the city value to your city/suburb
2. Set countryCode (e.g. AU)
3. Set county (e.g. Sydney)
4. Set district (most likely — null)
5. Set houseNumber (e.g. 2)
6. Send that cURL request

Then, once those have been sent, add changes to the following in the same way:

1. Set the first postalCode
2. Set state (e.g. NSW)
3. Set street
4. Send that cURL request

Lastly:

1. Update the second postalCode
2. Send that cURL request

According to Tony Vid:

The Label will update itself based on your input above. Weather and asking for nearby restaurants all work. Asking for my location also gives me the correct information. – Tony Vid

In the end, if that all works, you’ll be able to ask the Echo “Alexa, what’s the time?” and receive the right time. You’ll be able to set alarms and such accurately which is also pretty useful! I’ve double checked this process and it worked 100% for me too!

Sending over cURL

Each time you edit those values, you’ll want to make a cURL request to Amazon’s servers using that giant request string you have in your text editor. cURL comes with Mac OSX by default, but Windows users will need to head to the cURL download page to download and install it. If you’re not sure what to do, Zendesk has an overview on installing cURL for Windows that might help.

Once you have cURL installed, go to your Terminal (on Mac) or Command Prompt (on Windows) and paste in the full contents of what you’d been editing from your text editor. Hit Enter to run that command. It should take a few moments and then return a message of some kind. For me, it used to finish with this error:

{"message":"Unable to resolve postal code to an address"}

Recently, it hasn’t given any errors whatsoever and just returns nothing but the terminal ready for more action which is a good sign.

The result

If you followed the new order, it should all work. You’ll be able to ask the Echo, “Alexa, what’s the time?” and receive the right time. You’ll be able to set alarms and such accurately which is also pretty useful!

Note: Don’t worry if you return to the Echo settings page and it shows the US address still — this doesn’t seem to change in the web app.

Also note: Be careful with returning to the Echo settings page, I’ve found that a cached request or something along those lines ran when I went to my Echo settings. So check your timezone after visiting these settings in future to avoid any nasty timezone switching surprises.

For more information on getting other aspects of the Echo working in Australia, see my earlier post on How do I set up an Amazon Echo in Australia?

Got more questions about the Echo? Like, Is the Amazon Echo always listening? How does it work? Does it store its recordings? If so, can you delete them? Does it really only send audio to Amazon after hearing the wake word? I’ve got a detailed look in this article here.