Hermes 0.20: AI Agents Just Got Way Faster

**Julian Goldie** (0:00)
Hermes Agent version 0.2 just dropped. It's called the Herald Release. It changes how you use AI agents forever. You can now talk to Hermes like it's a phone call. It answers whilst it's still thinking. You can cut it off mid-sentence just by speaking, and you can say a wake word from across the room, and it will start listening. And there's one feature buried in this update that I think matters more than all of that combined. I'll get to it later, but once you see it, you understand where all of this is heading. Now, let me walk you through exactly what's new, how it works, and how to get it running today. First, the basics. This is from Noose Research. It's open source. It's free. Hundreds of contributors worked on the latest release, and updating takes one command. So you can type Hermes update inside your terminal, and you're done. If you're using the Agent OS, it's even easier. You can go to the Manage section, click Update, and you've got the latest version. That's it. Which means no install wizard, and no settings to dig through. Now, there's a lot inside this change log to talk about. Voice, citations, speed, agent-agent stuff. And if you just heard that list, it looks like a pile of random features, but it's one idea. So here's how I think about this whole release. I call it the Open Line Engine. Here's what I mean. Before this update, working with an AI agent was like sending letters. You would write something, you wait, it writes back, you read it, you write again. Every single exchange had a gap in it. The Herald release closes those gaps, and now there's an open line between you and your AI agent, an open line between your agent and your apps, and an open line between your agents themselves. Three open lines. That's the whole update, and once you see it that way, every feature in this release clicks into place. Let's start with the first line, the one between you and Hermes. The big one is called Talk to Hermes. It's real-time voice. Hermes speaks whilst it's still generating the answer. You don't wait for it to finish thinking and then read it wall of text. So it just starts talking to you. And here's the part that actually surprised me. You can now interrupt it mid-sentence, and you just start speaking, and it stops, listens, and adjusts like a real phone call. So you can interrupt it mid-sentence. You don't need to type forward slash stop or stop it manually or anything like that. You can steer it automatically using this system. So think about how you've used AI until now. You type a prompt, you wait, you read the answer. It's wrong or it's half right, so you type another prompt, or using the steer command, you wait again. That's the old way. The new way is that you can just talk. So you can use hey Hermes as the wake word. It talks back, you cut it and cut in when it drifts. It corrects the whole back and forth that used to take maybe five time messages, now happens in one conversation. And then there is the wake word itself. So you can set your own wake word, and Hermes listens for it hands free. So Hermes can sit in the background on another monitor or across the room. And when you say hey Hermes, it wakes up and starts working. I actually tested this inside the HNOS. So I said, hey Hermes, what time is it? And the message went straight into the chat and answered. So there's no clicking, there was no typing around, nothing. Now, I know what some of you are thinking right now. You're probably thinking, this sounds technical. I'm not a technical person, or maybe this stuff isn't for me. And honestly, this update is the exact reason that belief is now backwards. The whole point of voice is that the skill barrier is gone. If you can talk, you can run an AI agent. You don't need to even know commands anymore. You don't need to write clever prompts. You literally speak to it the way you'd speak to a person on your team. The least technical people I know are the ones who benefit the most from this update because talking was always a thing. They were already good at. Quick example. Let's say, for example, you're making dinner and you remember, you owe a client a reply. You can say your wake word and dictate the email whilst you stare in the pan, and it's drafted before you even sit down. Now, if you want Hermes set up like this without doing any of the writing yourself, this is exactly what we build inside the agent operating system for the AI Profit Boardroom. So it's a dashboard where Hermes is already plugged in next to your open core and all your other AI agents. The voice agent is already wired in. You get the whole thing as a zip file, a video tutorial showing you the install step-by-step plus a 30-day roadmap for putting Hermes to work, getting you leads and customers. And every time News ships a release like this Herald one, we update the agent OS and you get the new version. So you're never the person figuring out an update alone. Link in the comments description or go to .com to get access. So second part of that open line to you. Voice now works everywhere. So you can send Hermes a voice note on WhatsApp and other messaging platforms, and it applies with voice automatically. It's platform aware. So she knows where you're messaging from and responds the right way. So your agent stops being the thing that lives in one app on one computer. It's just there on whatever app you already use all day. Let's say, for example, you're walking between meetings. You can send a voice note asking Hermes to pull together notes for your next call. And the answer is waiting when you sit down. Next up, and this one matters a lot for anyone using AI for real work, grounded citations. There's a new citation skill, and it makes Hermes backup its research with sources. Every claim is now cited. It's kind of like how perplexity shows you where every fact comes from. So when you ask Hermes to research them, you don't just get an answer, you get the answer plus the receipts.