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!
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!
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):
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):
From there, scroll to “Device location” underneath “General” and click “Edit”:
Then, right click on the country dropdown and choose “Inspect” (this is on Google Chrome, on Firefox it is “Inspect Element”):
Click the arrow next to the code that starts with <select id=”data-device-address-country” to expand it:
Find the first country code value there (at the time of writing it is “AS” for American Samoa). Double click that value:
Change it to the country code you would like (e.g. “AU”) and then hit the Enter key:
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:
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!
Choose your new country and then enter in your address below it. Then hit “Save”!
It should successfully save your new address! Feel free to close the developer tools with the X on the bottom right.
When successful, I receive this message:
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!)
To test it out, ask it things such as:
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!
Comments
Christopher
It worked for me in Ottawa Canada
Ian
Just confirming what you already know, this works for me in Brisbane, Australia. Thanks for the tip.
Patrick Catanzariti
Great to hear! 😀
Alf
Can’t seem to get it to work in Perth, Australia. Curiously the sample Sydney address doesn’t work for me either.
Patrick Catanzariti
Yeah, that’s odd, it’s not working for me at the moment either… maybe Amazon have disabled them again :'(
Andrew
promising, what address format did you use for NZ please?
the following refuses to work for me.
xx rossmay terrace, kingsland, Auckland
PostCode 1024
Patrick Catanzariti
It seems at the moment that it isn’t working anymore, I think Amazon might have changed something again 🙁
Justin
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.
Patrick Catanzariti
Yeah, it seems to have been disabled once more by Amazon :'(
Zubair
Hi, no luck here from Cape Town. Really wish Amazon would enable it.
marc lallemand
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
Rafał Rudnik
Hi, no luck for any city in Poland. 🙁
Phil
Also not working for me in New Zealand 🙁
Rahul
No luck with adding a New Zealand address, either in Auckland or Hamilton 🙁
Wes Heiser
Used amazon.com to re-compose my Japan address in amazon format, but still no luck using that format on Alexa. Japan addresses do not work on Alexa.
Thank you for this informative website Patrick.
Patrick Catanzariti
Alexa is headed to Japan officially soon, so your wait shouldn’t be much longer!
Marco Herrera
I tried a number of the addresses you claim work to no avail. My address in Barcelona does not work.
Jeff VanderWal
Yay! New update allows Canadian addresses. Added my rural Nova Scotia address today after reading about the updates online.
Lubbly Jubbly
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?
Patrick Catanzariti
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!
Sabbe
Worked for me in Rome, Italy.