Amazon finally launched some of their devices in Canada. As a Canadian, we don’t always have the same things that our American friends do. This, in my opinion, doesn’t make sense. I have recently become the proud owner of an Amazon Tap. This makes me incredibly happy, and even more excited to be able to set it up when I got home. I am always listening to music and wanted to be able to roam through my house with a wireless speaker so I could have mini dance party’s in my kitchen or living room. But alas, I was unable to get my Tap to work. The internet didn’t provide me much by way of assistance either. Normally when these conditions are present, I start to shed tears. I didn’t, but it was touch and go for awhile.
I was kind of angry (as I often get when something doesn’t work for me) because I kept getting this stupid error:
Unable to configure device language. Error 15:1:26:0:2
Basically, my language of English (CA) wasn’t going to work.
What would work? Finding a way to change the language. I made the decision not to contact support because it was getting late. Sleep would help, and if it didn’t, I could contact support in the morning. Luckily, I managed to find a solution. No thanks to the internet, I might add. I was the only one in the world with this problem, or at least talking about it? Let me back this up slightly and explain that this wasn’t an easy thing to find. I have both an amazon.ca and an amazon.com account. My Amazon devices (Fire TV, Tablet etc.) were all connected to my .ca account. Even if I make Kindle purchases, they go through my .ca account for some reason. During my research, I found a website that said I had to go my .com account in order to change my language to American English.
That wasn’t quite the answer to my problems. I went into my .com account, and I couldn’t figure out how to set it to American English. Further, wouldn’t it have been in American English, to begin with? I mucked around for a bit, clicking anywhere that I could think to no avail. I ended up logging into my .ca account and under Manage Your Content and Devices, I had to transfer those devices over to my .com account. It seems weird, but that allowed me to then set my device up with American English, as the Tap then seemed to understand the language setting. Then you have to go to Manage Your Content and Devices in your .com account. Make sure that your country is set to “United States”, which can be found in Settings.
It did take me awhile to figure this out. For one, how things are laid out in the two accounts can be different. Sometimes there are more clicks in the .ca version, so it can be difficult to navigate through the two versions. Also, any advice that I read online said that I shouldn’t be doing anything in my .ca account. I guess I wasn’t, but I had to go in there in order to transfer my devices over. All that being said, Amazon is working on a fix for this. It was supposed to be fixed as of December 5th, but it still not working. If my workaround doesn’t bring you success, Amazon will have this corrected shortly. All I can say is that I’m happy that Alexa is finally available in Canada.