TODAY

Tencent Open-Sources 0.44GB 1.8B Mobile Translator for 33 Languages

Tencent open-sourced Hy-MT1.5-1.8B, quantized to 1.25-bit and squeezed to 440MB so it runs offline on phones at Snapdragon-865 tier. It covers 33 languages plus 5 minority languages — 1,056 directions in total, including Tibetan and Mongolian. Tencent claims the offline quality matches commercial APIs and 235B-class models, and beats Google Translate on strict benchmarks. Demo APK is on Hugging Face and ModelScope, with a background word-grabbing mode for email and browser inline translation. Takeaway: when small on-device models match cloud APIs, cloud translation stops being the only option.