Changelog
Hermes Agent v0.20.0
The "Herald" release — Hermes gets a voice you can interrupt, talks to other agents over A2A v1.0, and cites its sources. Rolls up everything since v0.19.0, including the v0.19.1 patch window.
Added
- Streaming conversational voice: Hermes speaks clause-by-clause as the reply generates, and you can cut in mid-sentence — it stops, listens, and the model is told you interrupted.
- Open-vocabulary wake words detected on-device, so no audio leaves your machine while it waits. Different wake phrases can route to different profiles.
- Voice notes in and TTS replies out across WhatsApp, Feishu, DingTalk, LINE, QQ, Photon and Weixin. Speech-to-text is now its own configurable `hermes tools` category.
- Agent-to-agent messaging via A2A v1.0.
- Signed outbound webhooks, so Hermes can announce events to your own systems.
- Grounded research with verifiable citations and fact-checking.
- Desktop app becomes a platform: artifacts with live preview, a plugin SDK, quick-entry from anywhere, and multiple windows.
- New CLI commands: `!` shell mode, `/init`, `/diff`, `/context` and `/focus`.
Fixed
- Tools now recover from their own failures instead of handing the model a dead end to guess around.
- Gentler, smarter context compression.
- Absorbs the entire v0.19.1 salvage window across gateway, voice, desktop and installer.
Before you upgrade
Snapshot the server first — Hermes ships often and not every release is quiet. Then:
hermes update
Re-run hermes doctor afterwards. If the upgrade leaves you with a
broken install, the fixes section covers the failures
that come up most.
Official release notes on GitHub →