Integrations

Hermes Agent connects to external systems for AI inference, tool servers, IDE workflows, programmatic access, and more. These integrations extend what Hermes can do and where it can run.

:::tip Start here If you only have time to set up one integration, set up Nous Portal — a single OAuth login covers 300+ models plus the four Tool Gateway tools (web search, image generation, TTS, and browser automation). :::

AI Providers & Routing

Hermes supports multiple AI inference providers out of the box. Use hermes model to configure interactively, or set them in config.yaml.

AI Providers — OpenRouter, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Hermes auto-detects capabilities like vision, streaming, and tool use per provider.
Provider Routing — Fine-grained control over which underlying providers handle your OpenRouter requests. Optimize for cost, speed, or quality with sorting, whitelists, blacklists, and explicit priority ordering.
Fallback Providers — Automatic failover to backup LLM providers when your primary model encounters errors. Includes primary model fallback and independent auxiliary task fallback for vision, compression, and web extraction.

Tool Servers (MCP)

MCP Servers — Connect Hermes to external tool servers via Model Context Protocol. Access tools from GitHub, databases, file systems, browser stacks, internal APIs, and more without writing native Hermes tools. Supports both stdio and SSE transports, per-server tool filtering, and capability-aware resource/prompt registration.

Web Search Backends

The web_search and web_extract tools support eight backend providers, configured via config.yaml or hermes tools:

Backend	Env Var	Search	Extract	Crawl
Firecrawl (default)	`FIRECRAWL_API_KEY`	✔	✔	✔
SearXNG	`SEARXNG_URL`	✔	—	—
Brave (free tier)	`BRAVE_SEARCH_API_KEY`	✔	—	—
DuckDuckGo (ddgs)	(none)	✔	—	—
Tavily	`TAVILY_API_KEY`	✔	✔	✔
Exa	`EXA_API_KEY`	✔	✔	—
Parallel	`PARALLEL_API_KEY`	✔	✔	—
xAI	`XAI_API_KEY`	✔	—	—

Quick setup example:

yaml

web:
  backend: firecrawl    # firecrawl | searxng | brave-free | ddgs | tavily | exa | parallel | xai

If web.backend is not set, the backend is auto-detected from whichever API key is available. Self-hosted Firecrawl is also supported via FIRECRAWL_API_URL.

Browser Automation

Hermes includes full browser automation with multiple backend options for navigating websites, filling forms, and extracting information:

Browserbase — Managed cloud browsers with anti-bot tooling, CAPTCHA solving, and residential proxies
Browser Use — Alternative cloud browser provider
Local Chromium-family CDP — Connect to your running Chrome, Brave, Chromium, or Edge browser using /browser connect
Local Chromium — Headless local browser via the agent-browser CLI

See Browser Automation for setup and usage.

Voice & TTS Providers

Text-to-speech and speech-to-text across all messaging platforms:

Provider	Quality	Cost	API Key
Edge TTS (default)	Good	Free	None needed
ElevenLabs	Excellent	Paid	`ELEVENLABS_API_KEY`
OpenAI TTS	Good	Paid	`VOICE_TOOLS_OPENAI_KEY`
MiniMax	Good	Paid	`MINIMAX_API_KEY`
xAI TTS	Good	Paid	`XAI_API_KEY`
NeuTTS	Good	Free	None needed

Speech-to-text supports six providers: local faster-whisper (free, runs on-device), a local command wrapper, Groq, OpenAI Whisper API, Mistral, and xAI. Voice message transcription works across Telegram, Discord, WhatsApp, and other messaging platforms. See Voice & TTS and Voice Mode for details.

IDE & Editor Integration

IDE Integration (ACP) — Use Hermes Agent inside ACP-compatible editors such as VS Code, Zed, and JetBrains. Hermes runs as an ACP server, rendering chat messages, tool activity, file diffs, and terminal commands inside your editor.

Programmatic Access

API Server — Expose Hermes as an OpenAI-compatible HTTP endpoint. Any frontend that speaks the OpenAI format — Open WebUI, LobeChat, LibreChat, NextChat, ChatBox — can connect and use Hermes as a backend with its full toolset.

Memory & Personalization

Built-in Memory — Persistent, curated memory via MEMORY.md and USER.md files. The agent maintains bounded stores of personal notes and user profile data that survive across sessions.
Memory Providers — Plug in external memory backends for deeper personalization. Eight providers are supported: Honcho (dialectic reasoning), OpenViking (tiered retrieval), Mem0 (cloud extraction), Hindsight (knowledge graphs), Holographic (local SQLite), RetainDB (hybrid search), ByteRover (CLI-based), and Supermemory.

Messaging Platforms

Hermes runs as a gateway bot on 27+ messaging platforms, all configured through the same gateway subsystem:

Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, Matrix, Mattermost, Email, SMS, DingTalk, Feishu/Lark, WeCom, WeCom Callback, Weixin, BlueBubbles, QQ Bot, Yuanbao, Home Assistant, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Teams Meetings, Microsoft Graph Webhook, Google Chat, LINE, ntfy, SimpleX, Open WebUI, Webhooks

See the Messaging Gateway overview for the platform comparison table and setup guide.

Home Automation

Home Assistant — Control smart home devices via four dedicated tools (ha_list_entities, ha_get_state, ha_list_services, ha_call_service). The Home Assistant toolset activates automatically when HASS_TOKEN is configured.

Plugins

Plugin System — Extend Hermes with custom tools, lifecycle hooks, and CLI commands without modifying core code. Plugins are discovered from ~/.hermes/plugins/, project-local .hermes/plugins/, and pip-installed entry points.
Build a Plugin — Step-by-step guide for creating Hermes plugins with tools, hooks, and CLI commands.

Training & Evaluation

Batch Processing — Run the agent across hundreds of prompts in parallel, generating structured ShareGPT-format trajectory data for training data generation or evaluation.