Tencent has released a compact AI translation model that can translate 33 languages entirely offline on a smartphone. The model, called Hy-MT1.5-1.8B-1.25bit, is only 440 MB in size but reportedly outperforms Google Translate on standard benchmarks.
The model covers 33 languages—including German, English, Chinese, Japanese, French, Tibetan, and Mongolian—plus five dialects, supporting 1,056 translation directions. It was compressed to 1.25 bits per parameter, shrinking from 3.3 GB to 440 MB, making it about 25% smaller and 10% faster than previous compressed versions without losing quality.
Tencent claims the model matches the performance of commercial services and much larger models like Qwen3-32B. The company has also released an Android demo app that can translate text across any app offline.
"With just 440 MB, Hy-MT1.5-1.8B-1.25bit achieves translation quality on par with models several hundred gigabytes in size."
This is part of a broader trend toward on-device AI, with Google also pushing its Gemma 4 model to run locally on smartphones. Tencent says the model has won 30 first-place finishes in international machine translation competitions.