Amazon Alexa now speaks “Australian”

Over the past week the press has been writing articles about the availability of Amazon Alexa, and referring to skills from local service providers also being available.

Unfortunately that hasn’t been the case for those of us who brought in their devices from the US, nor have the devices actually been available for sale.

This morning I noticed my Echo Dot was unable to interact with my light bulbs or speakers – it kept telling me to set up a mobile device from the app. I checked Google Play Store – the app is still not available, however logging in to the Alexa portal I noted that all of my devices were showing as offline.

A few minutes later they came back online, and I found that I was able to install the English (Australia) language pack on all devices except the Amazon Tap as it won’t be launching in Australia.

I was also able to install a variety of local skills and link them, which was something I couldn’t do before.

My existing skills had to be re-configured for services such as TP-Link Kasa (my WiFi lightbulbs) which was easy enough to then run a re-discovery and have them working again.

Spotify also had to be reconnected, as did Todoist, Office 365, and virtually everything else.

However Sonos and Harmony do not appear to be available, and as such I can’t pipe music from Alexa through to my Sonos speakers or control my media devices.

Given that Alexa is not officially launched until February 1st down under, I’m hoping these won’t be far behind.

My hope is that the Amazon Household functionality will also be made available soon, so that my wife and children no longer influence my music collection!

#FirstWorldProblems


Also published on Medium.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.