Tencent's 440 MB AI model translates 33 languages offline on your phone

Tencent has open-sourced a compact AI translation model that the company claims beats Google Translate and runs entirely offline on smartphones. The Hy-MT1.5-1.8B-1.25bit model covers 33 languages - including German, English, Chinese, Japanese, French, Tibetan, and Mongolian - plus five dialects and 1,056 translation directions.

On standard benchmarks, it matches commercial services and much larger models like Qwen3-32B. The trick is aggressive compression: at 1.25 bits per parameter, the model shrinks from 3.3 GB to 440 MB - about 25 percent smaller and 10 percent faster than earlier 1.67-bit approaches, with no quality loss.

Tencent also offers an Android demo app, available as an APK download, that translates words across any app offline. The company says the model has taken 30 first-place finishes in international machine translation competitions. Google is pushing in the same direction with Gemma 4, which runs locally on smartphones.