WhoBuilt

Hermes Full Course: Build Your 24/7 AI Chief of Staff in 45 Minutes

Jun 24, 2026· 45 min· 49K views·Watch on YouTube
#AI Agents#Voice AI#Identity & Access Management#Agent Skills

Speaker

Peter

Peter Yang, a creator at Peter Yang, walks viewers through building an always-on Hermes AI assistant, from installation and integrations to scheduled routines.

Choose a setup and install Hermes

Yang recommends running Hermes on an always-on Mac mini, with a separate user account and credentials to limit what it can access. He also describes installing it on a laptop or a roughly $5-per-month virtual private server. The desktop setup involves installing the app, connecting an AI model, and checking that the selected model is the one actually in use.

Connect Telegram and personalize the assistant

To connect Telegram, Yang creates a bot with BotFather, adds its token and his Telegram user ID in Hermes, then restarts the gateway and sets the chat as the home channel for scheduled messages. He suggests asking Hermes to interview you and save your preferences in `user.md`, then shaping its personality in `soul.md`. For common setup problems, he recommends `hermes doctor --fix` and `hermes gateway restart`.

Add voice and Google Workspace

Yang shows how to enable voice replies by asking Hermes through Telegram, and describes changing the voice, disabling streamed responses, and hiding system messages. For Google Workspace, he creates a Google Cloud project, enables Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, and Sheets APIs, configures OAuth, and gives Hermes the downloaded client file. In demonstrations, Hermes summarizes email action items, schedules a calendar event after confirmation, and edits a shared document, though the first edit needs formatting corrections.

Consider other useful integrations

Yang discusses WhatsApp and Slack, plus Granola for meeting notes, GitHub for backing up the Hermes folder to a private repository, and YouTube for transcripts and research. He says WhatsApp setup requires a separate phone number, while Slack involves creating and configuring an app. He suggests connecting tools based on the work you want Hermes to handle.

Build and schedule proactive routines

Yang explains cron jobs as scheduled tasks and recommends creating a skill, testing its output manually, improving it, and then scheduling it. His weekend planner finds family-friendly Bay Area activities and runs Friday mornings at 8:00. Other examples include a morning briefing based on calendar and email, a business review drawing on several services, and a weekly health review.

Takeaways

  • Use a dedicated account and grant only the access the assistant needs.
  • Test a skill manually and refine its output before scheduling it.
  • Use a separate chat channel as the default destination for scheduled messages.
  • Ask for confirmation before actions such as creating calendar events.
  • Back up the assistant's configuration so it can be restored on another machine.

Mentioned in this talk

OpenAIWithingsHermes AgentWhatsAppSlackTelegramOpenClawMac miniCodexClaudeChatGPTGPT-5.5Google WorkspaceGitHubYouTubeGranolaGoogle Cloud ConsoleGoogle VoiceClockworkcron jobmemoryOAuthMCPAgent skills

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