Reach it from your pocket
Put the assistant where you already chat
An assistant you can only reach at your desk is half an assistant. Hermes connects to the messaging apps you already use, so it is with you on your phone — and the bar for actually using it drops to zero.
- 1 Run
hermes gateway setupand choose a channel. Telegram is the easiest first one. - 2 Follow the prompts to create/connect a bot (for Telegram: talk to @BotFather, get a token, paste it in).
- 3 Verify with
hermes gateway status— your channel should show connected. - 4 On your phone, open the channel and message your agent:
Are you there? Remind me what you remember about my work. - 5 Confirm it replies on your phone, using the memory from lesson 2.
You sent a message from your phone and the same agent — with your memory — answered in your chat app.
One agent, many doorways
The gateway is what makes Hermes feel like a presence rather than a program you launch. In the desktop app you wire this up under the Messaging panel in the left sidebar, and the Gateway indicator in the status bar tells you when a channel is connected.
Hermes runs one gateway process that bridges many channels — Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, email — into the same agent with the same memory and skills. The CLI and your phone are just different doors into one assistant. This matters for a real reason from adoption research: tools that live where you already are get used; tools you have to go to get abandoned. Putting the agent in your pocket is not a gimmick — it is what turns 'I set it up once' into 'I use it every day'.
- ?Why is it the same agent whether you reach it from the terminal or from Telegram — what is shared underneath?
- ?Which channel do you actually check most? Why is that the right one to connect first?
- ?What new risks appear once the agent is reachable from a phone anyone might pick up?
- ?How does 'lives where you already chat' change how often you will really delegate to it?
Run a real task from your phone
Setup means nothing until you have actually used it in the wild. You will give it a genuine task on the move.
From your phone, hand Hermes a real task that draws on its memory of you, and judge the reply as if you were the user (you are).
- 1 Away from your desk, message the agent a real request from your day — a quick lookup, a draft, a 'what should I prioritise' question.
- 2 Make it one that benefits from memory, so the answer is personalised, not generic.
- 3 If the reply is too long for a phone, tell it
keep replies short on this channeland see if it adapts. - 4 Take a screenshot of the exchange.
A phone screenshot of a real, memory-aware task handled in your chat app, plus one line on whether you would actually use this daily.
✎The easier an assistant is to reach, the more you delegate to it — and the more it can quietly do. Where is the line for you between 'conveniently in my pocket' and 'too much access on a device I sometimes leave unlocked'?