I spent the day yesterday playing with Hermes. At some point I was using OpenClaw, but I decided to go with Hermes instead because it felt more polished, more professional. I still don't have a very professional or useful thing to do with it yet, but I think it can be incredibly useful once I figure it out. Right now I have it running with my ChatGPT subscription — the $20 one — using ChatGPT 5.5 as the main driver.
Here's what I set up so far: I gave it its own laptop (cuz I don't fully trust it yet), its own Gmail address, and a shared Google Drive folder in case I need it to write documents. I also configured Signal on it so I can send it messages — including voice messages.
It has text-to-speech built in, but it didn't have speech-to-text for transcription. So I set up a local Speaches engine that handles both, told it to configure itself to use it, gave it the local URL, explained the API format, and that was it. Now it can understand my voice messages and reply back using one of the built-in TTS voices. Works fine.
One thing I'm especially happy about: I made it fully bilingual. I told it to detect whether I'm speaking English or Spanish, and it picks the right voice accordingly — so it doesn't end up answering in Spanish with a weird robotic English accent. Really pleased with how that turned out.
I also built an automation for my wife using Playwright. It logs into a browser and goes through each day doing a repetitive task over and over. I then hooked that into Hermes, so now when she sends a voice message asking it to prep her daily report, Hermes asks her a few questions, waits for her confirmation, and then launches the script — headless Chrome, Playwright, the whole thing. That's working, and I'm pretty excited about it.
The big thing I keep coming back to with Hermes is that it's only as useful as the time you put into teaching it. It's smart, but you have to actually show it how you want things done — the same way you'd onboard a new employee. The cool part is you can just tell it to configure itself for something and it figures it out. I even gave it the sudo password for its laptop yesterday so it can update its own OS and software without me. I'm still not handing it anything sensitive, but being able to delegate that kind of maintenance is genuinely nice.
I'll keep playing with it. I want to find more little things it can take off my plate, and hopefully at some point it becomes something that really, truly helps me day to day.