Does Amazon Echo work in countries where Amazon is yet to launch Echo officially?

Question

I am considering to get an Echo Dot in UK but will use in it a country where Amazon is yet to launch officially. Will Echo even work? If anyone from community has tried something similar can you please list what features on Echo are limited in countries outside the supported list?

I intend to use Echo for following thing to begin with:

• Controlling smart home devices, lights, plugs
• Creating to do lists
• Use tune in
• Setting alarms
• Checking some facts quickly

Answer 1

The support is generally pretty good for locations outside of the UK, US and Germany (although it's not officially supported yet).

Coomie's experience of using the device in Australia is useful to read—here's a brief summary:

What does work?

Core - Amazon itself works as long as it has power and internet.

Smart home - All the smart home devices that would otherwise work in your country work.

Time zones - You can set your timezone to anywhere in the world.

Music - It can play music if you would otherwise be able to play it, e.g. Amazon Play, Pandora & Spotify all work for me.

Weather - It can get weather for most cities in the world, but you must ask about your city. e.g. "Alexa, what is the weather in Cairo, Egypt?"

More Skills - All the skills that don't require your location have worked for me.

However, I've heard that there are workarounds to set your location, despite it not being officially supported. It's a bit involved, but Beebom outline the steps to set a custom location through the Alexa website (alexa.amazon.com). You need to edit the device location, then:

• Start typing any US based address here, we used “2201 Westlake Avenue, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98121”, and then click on “Save”. In the Developer Tools, you will see a couple of entries, select the one on the bottom. Right click on it, and select “Copy as curl“.

• First off, paste the copied curl command into an editor such as Sublime Text, or Notepad++. [...] Change the "timeZoneId" to whatever time zone you are in. For us, it was “Asia/Kolkata”.

• Once that is done, change the following fields to reflect your local values: city (“Delhi”, in our example) countryCode (“IN”, in our example) county (null for us, if you have a county, you can put that value here.) district (null, for us) houseNumber (null, for us)

• Now, send the curl command.

You can find the curl documentation on their website, although it's helpful to be comfortable with the command line if you want to do that.

You can just set a location in your device's region, though, if you don't want to go through all of this—location-based services will be wrong, but if you don't mind, it's far easier than sending API requests.

---

In summary:

• all the core functionality works fine, even outside the UK.
• you can manually set your location using the API (but that might break some skills that are expecting a UK-based location—I haven't tested, but I bet TuneIn would break with a non-UK location).

You might want to test Alexa through a different device before buying an Echo to test for yourself. You could try using this Echo simulator after setting up an account with Amazon and following the steps above. It should behave near identically to a real Echo, so you'll get a feel for what works and what doesn't.