On November 21, Tencent unveiled advanced search capabilities in its Sogou Input Method, a widely used tool for Chinese character input, now powered by its Hunyuan artificial intelligence model.
Designed for use across learning, work, and social scenarios, Sogou Input Method enables users to search while composing messages or writing text. By integrating intelligent search within the input box, Sogou Input Method delivers reference information and answers efficiently—at no cost to users.
In its latest update, the input box now functions as a search bar. This AI-driven feature, available on both PC and mobile platforms, allows users to input queries naturally as they type. The tool simplifies tasks such as drafting text, reading articles, or navigating web content, while also offering instant access to general knowledge.
For everyday queries like checking the weather, a quick search feature, also driven by AI, enhances convenience. Users can type directly into the chatbox, selecting suggested keywords to receive immediate results. This feature covers over 40 common scenarios, including mortgage calculations, retirement age predictions, holiday schedules, city-specific data, translations, and even classical poetry searches, bringing real-time conversational search to users’ fingertips.
“Sogou Input Method serves over 600 million daily active users, with average usage exceeding 30 minutes per day across nearly all terminal platforms,” said Chai Baoquan, product manager of Sogou Input Method, in an interview with 36Kr. “Through iterative updates, we aim to bring the power of large AI models to a broader audience.”
The product launch event also featured Zhang Feng, Tencent’s head of Hunyuan applications, who outlined the technical strategy behind the integration. According to Zhang, Hunyuan’s development follows two paths: breadth and depth. The breadth strategy involves expanding from language models to multimodal understanding and generation, enabling richer interactions with the physical world. Depth focuses on pushing the model’s intelligence to tackle complex tasks, aiming for artificial general intelligence (AGI).
“Hunyuan has been integrated into more than 700 applications, supporting both efficiency enhancement and product innovation. The AI search feature in Sogou Input Method exemplifies product innovation by offering faster, more streamlined user experiences,” Zhang said.
Zhang also previewed Tencent’s future roadmap, highlighting a new version of Hunyuan, with approximately half the parameters of the current model, which will offer equivalent performance while doubling generation speed.
Additionally, Tencent plans to open-source more model variants, ensuring progress in AI accessibility.
Upcoming features also include an AI assistant for voice calls and tools for generating presentation slides. Zhang said that Tencent’s AI-generated slide decks will prioritize accuracy, requiring minimal user intervention to produce professional-grade output.
KrASIA Connection features translated and adapted content that was originally published by 36Kr. This article was written by Wang Fangyu for 36Kr.