Available on Windows, Android, Mac, and iOS, Baidu Input also offers a “seniors’ version” on Android with a bigger keyboard and handwriting area.ĭeveloped by Google China Labs, Google Pinyin was made publicly available in 2007.
Earlier this year, Baidu released an AI-powered mobile version featuring voice-to-text capabilities in both English and Chinese. Released in 2010, many of Baidu Input features, such as the dictionaries, translations, and synchronization, are supported by Baidu’s search engine and cloud technology.
The service is available for both Windows and Android, but Tencent has discontinued QQ Pinyin for Mac and recommended Sogou as a replacement. Users with a QQ Messenger account can synchronize the tool with their personal dictionaries, made up of the user’s frequently used words and phrases. It also tracks typing statistics, which can be used obtain level-up badges next to one’s QQ display name and compete with one’s QQ friends. It was consolidated with Sogou in 2013, though they maintain their different branding. Released in 2007 by Tencent, QQ Pinyin is China’s second most popular pinyin input tool. Sogou Input also offers customized versions: Its “physicians’ edition” (医生版) for example, is tailored to health industry professionals with medical dictionaries and auto-completion of health-related terms. In addition to Windows, Android, Mac, and iOS, Sogou Input are also available in platforms that are not offered by other third-party pinyin input, such as Linux, Symbian, and Meego. At the time, its web and search engine-based dictionaries were considered pioneering, as they collected and predicted popular expressions and neologisms from the internet. The most popular pinyin tool on the mainland, Sogou Input was first released in 2006. Here are four of the most popular third-party pinyin tools in China: Third-party pinyin input tools can further the experience with built-in or downloadable word databases which predict words and phrases based on modern idioms and internet slang-as well as customized display themes, personalized dictionaries, voice input, emoji suggestions, and translation.
Today, most if not all operating systems are pre-installed with a pinyin input method, which usually include features such as word prediction, abbreviation, and spell-check to make typing more efficient.
Pinyin input itself has gone through various reforms since personal computers first entered Chinese households in the 1990s: In those days, users had to install a pinyin input tool separately, type out the full spelling of each character, and could only convert one character of a word or phrase at a time. Since then, though, pinyin has become the most popular electronic input method on the Chinese mainland (though the stroke-based Wubi method has its acolytes), being easy to pick up for new Mandarin learners and perfectly tailored to modern keyboards based on the Latin alphabet. When language reformers first developed pinyin in 1958, the phonetic writing system was adopted with the aim of improving mass literacy in China’s immediate present, rather than facilitate a future of electronic communication.
Walled-Off is a new series explaining how to navigate-and take advantage of-the domestic web without the use of certain “s pecial software.” You may be stuck behind the Great Firewall, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it.