How To - Sync Your Personal Dictionary Across Android Phones
Not being able to do this bugged me for years
If you’ve ever used a personal dictionary on an Android phone and then wanted to have that dictionary be available on a new/different phone, I hope this may be a useful tip for you. For me, it has relieved several years worth of frustration with having to recreate the personal dictionary from scratch every time I switched to a new phone.
I use my phone as much as any device for note taking - at work and outside of work. Having a personal dictionary on the phone makes note taking faster and easier - especially for words that are very commonly used in my work environment, but not so commonly used elsewhere. Typing or speaking (voice-to-text) these words on the virtual keyboard often leads to errors or confusing the actual term with a more commonly used word. NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) is a good example - that is far more likely to be rendered as mist if I don’t have a dictionary entry for it.
For years, I was in a Charlie Brown trying to kick the football loop with the ability to sync the personal dictionary between phones. Google claimed that it was a sync option along with others for a Google account. It was said to be simple - just tick the box to sync it and job done. And I never ever saw this work for me across a number of years. I asked friends and work colleagues about this, and asked online friends, power users of mobile devices and Android phones. I never came across anyone who A) could say they had seen this work or B) had any suggestions beyond Google’s sync option.
Now for some great news. It is easy to make this work. It is not real sync, but it is an easy way to export and import an Android / Gboard personal dictionary. Here’s how this works:
Go to Settings on your phone and choose System (on a Pixel) or General Management (on a Samsung phone) or use search within settings to see where Languages settings live
Choose Languages & Input and then On-screen Keyboard
Then choose Gboard, and under the Gboard Settings list, choose Dictionary, then Personal Dictionary and the language for the personal dictionary, English (US) for example.
Then tap on the three dots in the top right corner of the personal dictionary page - and you will see the Import and Export options
The export is done as a standard .zip file - named PersonalDictionary.zip - and you can choose to export it to Google Drive, send it as an email attachment, and a few other options depending on what apps you have installed on your phone.
When you use the Import function - just go to Drive or wherever you saved your export file to and select PersonalDictionary.zip. Gboard pulls in the dictionary contents with no need for you to worry about extracting(decompressing) the .zip file.
And that’s it. Not real zero-touch sync between phones - but just a few clicks and far better than starting all over with the personal dictionary on a new phone.