Android keyboard SwiftKey now syncs your typing habits to the cloud

If you’ve spent dozens of hours training the popular Android keyboard SwiftKey to learn the nuances of your touchscreen thumb pecking, the last thing you’d want to do is start all over when you upgrade your phone.

Today SwiftKey has finally solved this dilemma with SwiftKey Cloud, which — you guessed it — lets you back up your typing habits to the cloud. Once your data is stored safely, you can easily restore your typing data to your current phone, or synchronize it with another Android device.

Additionally, SwiftKey Cloud will automatically update your typing profile with “Trending Phrases” — the result of combing news and Twitter sources for popular new words and phrases.

SwiftKey Cloud will initially be available for free with the new SwiftKey 4.2 beta app. (The app normally costs $3.99 on Google Play.)

Ultimately, all of the new cloud services should make SwiftKey the ideal virtual keyboard: One that’s always learning from you, remembers your habits, and evolves with trends.

“What we’ve done with cloud sync — which is why it’s taken so long to engineer — doesn’t just take a file from your device and put it on a server,” said Joe Braidwood, SwiftKey’s chief marketing officer, in an interview with VentureBeat. “It thresholds predictive insights from all of your different content services … so when it gets brought back down to your advice they’re blended in.”

SwiftKey also has the ability to learn your language habits from Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, text messages, and RSS feeds (to get your voice from your blog), and today it has added Yahoo Mail into the mix.

Competing keyboard Swype (now owned by Nuance) also backs up some of your data to the cloud, but Braidwood notes that it’s “fairly non-ambitious by comparison.” Swype isn’t synchronizing your typing habits, just your personal dictionary (and friends names from Facebook and other social networks). It’s also worth pointing out that SwiftKey recently added gesture typing, which is Swype’s core feature.

London-based Swiftkey was founded in 2008 and has raised over $4 million in funding so far from Octopus Ventures, Cambridge Capital Group, and others.