(Yicai Global) July 13 -- China's internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. [HKG:0700] has been expanding its presence in the artificial intelligence (AI) area since setting up an AI lab. Following its roll-out of 'Jueyi,' an AI computer program that can play popular game Go, earlier this year, Tencent unveiled a translation software called 'Fanyijun' yesterday. The software can provide translation between Chinese and English, Japanese and Korean languages in both written and oral formats.

The AI-assisted translation software not only provide sentence translation, translation of photographed texts and dictionary services but also offer simultaneous interpretation services, Yicai Global learned.

In terms of Chinese-to-English translation, Fanyijun can identify more than 90 percent of Chinese words but can only translate popular Chinese words of the day by using pinyin, Yicai Global finds after using it. However, Fanyijun doesn't perform so well in English-to-Chinese translation in terms of both word identification and translation accuracy and can only translate some of the commonly used phrases.

Aside from simultaneous interpretation, the software also provides voice translation, dictionary and translation of photographed texts services. The product team is still working to improve the new software's functions. Fanyijun is the first voice translation software introduced by Tencent that uses AI technology it has developed.