I stumbled across an idea in a video the other day that was something I had been wanting for a long time. At 2:32 in this clip, the creator mentions using Hermes agent to create a personalized podcast.
So I gave Hermes a single instruction: "Every morning, find the outlier posts from my Piefed subscriptions (credentials in the .env file), summarize them, record yourself reading them, and send everything to my Telegram."
It did all of it. No, really.
What Hermes Actually Did (On Its Own)
I didn't write a single line of code. Hermes handled:
- Writing the outlier detection script. It pulled Piefed's API docs, figured out the endpoints, and wrote a Python script that calculates moving averages per community and flags posts more than 2 standard deviations above the mean.
- Writing the summarization pipeline. It built the logic to fetch article content from each outlier link and summarize it.
- Creating the audio. It invoked its own voice synthesis to read those summaries aloud and save them as audio files.
- Sending to Telegram. It used its Telegram bot to deliver both the audio file and a text summary.
- Setting the cron job. It configured its own scheduled task to run every morning at 6 AM.
The Result
I asked to send it to me now about an hour after installing the agent, and there's already an audio message. I press play, and Hermes reads me the most interesting posts from the communities I follow — without me opening an app, touching a terminal, or writing a script.
The pipeline scans roughly 295 posts per run, flags the top 15% by score, filters out image-only posts, fetches article content via trafilatura, generates 2-3 sentence summaries, synthesizes audio with AriaNeural, and sends the whole thing to Telegram with a voice message — all running on a cron job that the agent set up itself.
I didn't even wait for the 6 AM cron. I told it to send me the briefing right now, and a few minutes later my phone buzzed with a voice message. It took about 20 minutes from "do this" to listening to it on my phone.
Inspired by the concept discussed here: https://youtu.be/tP6yf22OJdI?t=152