Hermes as a family assistant

One always-on Hermes box the whole household talks to, with a separate agent for anyone who wants a private line.

Hermes is Nous Research’s always-on agent (MIT license, works with any model, v0.19.0 as of July 2026). It’s a terminal CLI plus a hermes gateway daemon that answers on Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, Home Assistant and about twenty other platforms.

Here it runs a household. It posts a morning brief in the family group chat, catches calendar clashes, builds the grocery list from things people mention, and runs lights and heating on request. Each person talks to their own scoped agent, so no single bot remembers everything about everyone.

AI-generated answers about this build describe “an admin profile and restricted member roles” inside one agent. Hermes has no role tiers. You’re either paired with the gateway or you aren’t. What it has is profiles: fully separate agents, each with its own config, credentials, memory, toolsets and gateway. Most of this plan is getting that structure right (see architecture).

Effort and cost. Budget a weekend to set up, then evenings to tune. It builds on my smart home and community manager plans. You pay for model API calls times a chatty family, metered Nous Portal tools if the agent fills a grocery cart, and an always-on machine. The mini PC already running Home Assistant is the usual pick.

The plan in six parts

Is this for you?

It suits households that already run on a group chat, where you’re the unpaid scheduler. If you run Home Assistant, you already have the box and half the integrations. Skip it if nobody else will message the thing. With one user it’s a personal assistant with extra YAML.

It doesn’t cover Home Assistant device setup (that’s the smart home plan), never pays for anything, and isn’t for watching your kids. The member boundaries keep everyone’s messages private, from you as well.