Yes. The day may have finally come. It looks like some people outside of the US and UK can now set their Echo to their local address and timezone — no workarounds or hacks required! Happy days!

An Echo and Echo Dot on a globe

We’ve hit a new frontier… easily accessible international location settings!

Update: This article has been updated to reflect a new method! The cURL method (seen at the bottom of our guide here) and the Request Maker method (seen at the bottom of our guide here) both appear to be working for some people too.

It appears that the whole madness might indeed be over for some lucky countries! It moves across the border from the UK and Germany to France and Belgium… but misses poor Netherlands and Luxembourg. Continues into Italy and Spain though.

Places which are not supported will show the error — “Could not set your address. Please ensure you have correctly entered a complete address.”

This could just be a matter of finding out what the right way to format the address is that Amazon understands? So far, it seems like some of Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are the lucky ones. The more I enter in addresses, the more it seems these countries have been chosen specifically.

If you try this out and it does indeed work, let us know in the comments below! I’d like to update the list above with the locations that do and do not work!

How to change your local address

I was able to set up my 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):

Go to Settings and then click your Echo's name on the right

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):

Go to Settings and then click your Echo's name on the right

Finding your Echo’s settings

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

Click edit next to device location

Editing our location

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

Right click on the country dropdown and click inspect

Inspecting the country dropdown

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

Click the arrow next to the select tag with data-device-address-country

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:

Double click to edit the AS value

Editing the AS value

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

Change it to the country code you'd like and hit enter

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:

Double click the name beside it and change it to the country name

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

We now have Australia in the dropdown menu!

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

Enter your address and 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.

The update is successful, close developer tools

A successful address update!

When successful, I receive this message:

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

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!)

Change the timezone to your local one

Changing your timezone too

To test it out, ask it things such as:

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

 

 

Did this work for you? Let me know in the comments!

Wondering how to buy an Amazon Echo in places that it isn’t available? I’ve got a guide to that right here (my focus is on Australia but some of the services work for other countries too).

Know other emerging tech enthusiasts who might want to read this too? Please like and share this post with them!

Would you like to republish this article in your own publication?
Contact Dev Diner to request official republication of this article.

Comments

Can’t seem to get it to work in Perth, Australia. Curiously the sample Sydney address doesn’t work for me either.

Yeah, that’s odd, it’s not working for me at the moment either… maybe Amazon have disabled them again :'(

promising, what address format did you use for NZ please?
the following refuses to work for me.

xx rossmay terrace, kingsland, Auckland
PostCode 1024

It seems at the moment that it isn’t working anymore, I think Amazon might have changed something again 🙁

Currently, I have found no working solution to add my New Zealand address – yet family living on the same street have their New Zealand address in and working. Nothing seems to work, whether it’s within the Android App, the website, or using the “PUT” request edit.

Hi, no luck here from Cape Town. Really wish Amazon would enable it.

hi I’m from Brussels-Belgium and just got my echo from a friend in the UK
I’ve been trying for a few days to get it to accept my actual location, with no luck…
I even tried your address format, nothing…
bizarrely, it seems to accept addresses in France,
I believe Belgium is too small a dot
on the map to be noticed…

😀

thanks for the info

Also not working for me in New Zealand 🙁

No luck with adding a New Zealand address, either in Auckland or Hamilton 🙁

I tried a number of the addresses you claim work to no avail. My address in Barcelona does not work.

Yay! New update allows Canadian addresses. Added my rural Nova Scotia address today after reading about the updates online.

The list of countries is now “hard-coded” in a drop-down and New Zealand ain’t there.

Assume there’s no way around this?

Not sure yet! Gotta try to see if doing the cURL method or anything works instead… but it’s looking like they’ve got a lot more validation in there.

I’ll try to see if there’s any workarounds and will update if I find one! If anyone has any luck, let me know!

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