In the context of the explosive growth of AI applications, an increasing number of industries are being reshaped by AI, including the indispensable daily tool—the "input method."

On January 27, Tencent Sogou Input Method officially announced its comprehensive AI transformation, launching the upgraded major 20.0 AI version, featuring full-scale enhancements to its AI Voice, AI Translation, and AI Typing models.

Having been around for nearly 20 years, Sogou Input Method, which has traversed both the PC internet era and the mobile internet era, has secured the top position in the input method industry with a user base of 600 million. Now, at the dawn of the AI era, Sogou Input Method must actively embrace AI to remain a relevant player in the game.

The upgrade of Sogou Input Method is not merely a simple functional iteration but represents a deep advancement of Tencent's strategic AI layout in the input method sector. Early last year, Sogou Input Method, along with products like Yuanbao, QQ Browser, and ima, was integrated into Tencent's CSIG (Cloud and Smart Industries Group) to foster faster iterative innovation in AI products.

Chai Baoquan, the head of large model products for Tencent Sogou Input Method, stated that the 20.0 AI version marks the starting point, not the endpoint, of Sogou Input Method's comprehensive AI transformation.

Typing capability is the core function of an input method.

Shen Xiangjin, the head of AI typing products for Tencent Sogou Input Method, pointed out that within the existing technical framework, typing input has certain limitations and constraints. For instance, while vocabularies have become more extensive, coverage of long-tail words remains insufficient, timeliness in recognizing new and trending words is still lacking, and understanding of user input intent, context, and linguistic nuance is not yet comprehensive.

The advent of large AI models has created more possibilities for solving these technical challenges. Against this backdrop, Sogou Input Method's self-developed AI Typing large model has undergone a comprehensive upgrade, enabling deep understanding of context and user intent to make input faster and more accurate across all scenarios.

More noteworthy is the customized service for professional scenarios. Sogou Input Method has partnered with authoritative databases like Tencent Medipedia and Deli Technology to provide unique AI-customized services for professionals such as doctors and lawyers. These services include quick input of professional terms, fast lookup of legal clauses and medication instructions, among various efficiency-boosting features. This signifies that input methods are deepening their penetration from general-purpose tools into vertical scenarios.

Compared to typing, voice input is becoming the preferred choice for more people due to its speed and convenience. Data shows that the daily average number of voice input uses on Tencent Sogou Input Method is continuously rising and has now reached nearly 2 billion times.

Therefore, AI voice input is also a key focus of Sogou Input Method's capability upgrade this time.

It is reported that this AI voice upgrade, based on the AI Voice large model developed by Tencent Hunyuan, has achieved a 40% improvement in speech recognition fluency, increased the overall accuracy rate to 98%, and boosted dialect recognition accuracy by 30%.

However, from the perspective of Rao Feng, the head of AI voice algorithms for Tencent Sogou Input Method, "hearing more accurately" was the focus of competition in the first half of the AI voice race. As the second half arrives, AI voice also needs to "hear more intelligently," completing a role transformation from mere "input" to "recording," essentially addressing users' needs for "expression" and "creation."

Based on this, Sogou Input Method has launched the "Spoken to Written Language" feature. Leveraging the Tencent Hunyuan foundation model, this function can polish colloquial and disorganized voice input content into coherent and concise written text with one click. The intent behind this feature is clear: to act as a user's "electronic mouthpiece," significantly lowering the barrier to voice input.

Simultaneously, for common phonetic confusion issues in voice input, such as distinguishing "he/she/it" or the Chinese particles "de/di/de," the new version provides intelligent candidate replacement options to make corrections more convenient.

Against the backdrop of increasingly frequent global communication, translation functionality has also become a necessity for input methods. Sogou Input Method's AI Translation feature now exclusively integrates the Tencent Hunyuan-7B translation model, supporting translation upon input for over 30 languages, covering multiple scenarios like social interaction, travel, study, and office work.

At the International Conference on Computational Linguistics (ACL) WMT2025 competition concluded in late August last year, Tencent's Hunyuan-MT-7B model secured first place in 30 out of the total 31 language pair contests.

With the rapid development and practical application of large AI model technology, input methods, as tool-based products existing since the internet's inception, are accelerating the expansion of AI's application boundaries in input scenarios. This evolution enables input methods to not only facilitate user typing and expression but also to perform tasks.

The comprehensive AI upgrade of Sogou Input Method is also part of Tencent's strategic layout for AI entry points.

Previously, Sogou Input Method had successively upgraded and launched functions such as AI Search, AI Writing Assistant, AI Emoji Synthesis, and Picture-to-Text. Among these, the daily request volume for the AI Emoji Hunyuan Image Search has reached hundreds of millions.

The current user base for Sogou Input Method's AI features has also surpassed 100 million.

From an industry perspective, input methods are characterized by high frequency, essential need, and strong user stickiness, making them a crucial scenario for the implementation of AI technology.

Chai Baoquan indicated that in the future, Sogou Input Method will follow the direction set by the 20.0 AI version, continuously enhancing the intelligent input experience for users through large AI model technology and Agent capabilities. In two weeks, Sogou Input Method will upgrade its AI Writing Assistant service.

This implies that input methods will possess stronger proactive service capabilities, able to understand user intent and offer assistance actively.

The comprehensive AI transformation of Sogou Input Method signifies the official entry of the input method sector into the AI era. Looking at the competitive landscape, the input method market has shifted from pure functional competition to a competition based on AI capabilities. AI metrics such as voice recognition accuracy, translation ability, and intelligent prediction are becoming the new dimensions of competition.

For Tencent, the AI upgrade of Sogou Input Method represents an important implementation of its AI strategy in consumer-facing scenarios. In the AI era, whether input methods can become a new traffic gateway is a question worth continued attention.