Hermes Talk

Realtime duplex voice for your own agent — talk to it, it runs real work in the background, it reports back out loud.

Hermes Talk is a realtime voice plugin for Hermes Agent: you speak, it answers out loud, and it calls the agent's own tools without leaving the conversation. It runs in the terminal (hermes talk), in a Discord voice channel (/talk join), and in the Hermes dashboard Talk tab.

It rides your ChatGPT or SuperGrok subscription. No API key required.

The realtime lanes are OpenAI Realtime (gpt-realtime-2.1, on your ChatGPT subscription through codex login), xAI Grok Voice (on an X Premium or SuperGrok login, no key), and Gemini Live (which does need a GEMINI_API_KEY — free-tier AI Studio keys work); GPT-Live is selected separately by TALK_VOICE_MODE=live and runs gpt-live-1-codex on the Codex subscription or gpt-live-1 on explicitly chosen API billing.

Talk calls the host's tools, delegates background work while you keep talking, reports results, and handles current approval requests. Provider support differs by surface; see the tables below.

What it is: a plug-in that adds interruptible, duplex speech-to-speech voice to an existing Hermes Agent install — one bidirectional audio session in which the agent uses its real tools, hands work to background agents, and speaks the results when they land.

Who it is for: people already running Hermes Agent who would rather talk to it than type at it, and who want to keep talking while it works. It is not a standalone assistant, and it does not replace Hermes's built-in turn-based voice mode — that is a different shape, and a good one.

🔊 Watch the 2:27 cut with sound — delegate, keep talking, hear the result land.

Real Realtime session, 8× speed in the GIF, recorded at v0.3.0. It does not demonstrate the new GPT-Live or Codex-worker integration.

Install

hermes plugins install TheSmokeDev/hermes-talk --enable
pip install "hermes-talk[audio]"   # mic + speaker support (sounddevice); skip if dashboard-only

Needs Python ≥ 3.11 and a Hermes host ≥ v0.17. GPT-Live, shared task attachment and Codex workers need additional host capabilities; the full list is in Prerequisites.

Quickstart

Terminal — start here:

hermes talk

You are live: speak, and it answers out loud in the same breath. Ctrl+C hangs up. → Use

Discord — the call happens inside a voice channel, not in chat:

/voice join     # put Hermes in the voice channel first
/talk join      # Talk borrows that connection — it never opens a second one

Talk answers in the room everyone can hear; /talk leave ends it. Mutating tools stay denied until you set TALK_DISCORD_OPERATOR_USER_IDS. → Discord voice

Dashboard — browser audio, no local mic drivers:

hermes dashboard    # then open the Talk tab and hit Start

Allow the microphone and talk. You see the live transcript plus a list of background runs. → Dashboard tab

New in 0.20.0