Tencent Releases 440MB Offline AI Translator That Beats Google Translate — Runs Entirely on Your Phone
Tencent has released a compact AI translation model as an open-weight model that, according to the company, outperforms Google Translate and runs entirely offline on smartphones. The model, Hy-MT1.5-1.8B-1.25bit, supports 33 languages — including English, Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Tibetan, and Mongolian — and covers 5 dialects across 1,056 translation directions.
On standard benchmarks, it matches the performance of commercial translation services and significantly larger models such as Qwen3-32B. This is made possible through compression to 1.25 bits per parameter: memory requirements drop from 3.3 GB to just 440 MB — approximately 25% smaller and 10% faster than earlier 1.67-bit approaches, with no loss in quality.
At just 440 MB, Hy-MT1.5-1.8B-1.25bit delivers translation quality on par with models that are several hundred gigabytes in size.
Tencent also offers an Android demo app available as an APK download, which translates words in the background across all apps without requiring an internet connection. According to the company, the model has won 30 first-place rankings at international machine translation competitions. Google is pursuing a similar direction with Gemma 4, which also runs local AI directly on mobile devices.
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