We're used to AI being a tab. Open it, explain who you are and what you're working on, paste the same context, get an answer, close it. It's useful. So is a hammer.
An agent that lives in your Telegram feels different. You don't "open" it — you text it. The way you text friends, in the same chat list, between your mum and the work group. A voice note on the go, a forwarded contract, "remind me on Friday". It answers, remembers what you talked about last Tuesday, and sometimes writes first: with what matters today, or with what it got done while you slept.
It isn't that it's smarter. Models are roughly at the same level everywhere now. It's that it's there. Not an app you launch, but someone who's already around.
And that it's yours. I want to explain that word without the marketing, because everything rests on it.
- Its own computer.
- Your agent gets its own isolated Ubuntu machine with a persistent disk, separate from everyone else's. That's where it runs code, keeps files, searches the web and holds on to what you give it.
- Its own memory.
- Everything it knows about you lives on that machine's disk, as plain files and a database of your conversations. You can open, read, correct, download or delete them. Your memory doesn't dissolve into someone else's cloud or turn into someone's training set.
- Your own bot.
- The agent lives in a Telegram bot that belongs to you: your name for it, your avatar, your account as the owner. Not one shared bot for a million people where you're a row in a table.
Under the hood is Hermes Agent, an open-source project under the MIT license. I didn't hide it or rename it "our proprietary technology". If you ever want to leave, take its memory and skills and run the same Hermes anywhere: your own server, your laptop. That seems fair to me. You should stay because it's good, not because you're locked in.
Now, what isn't only yours, so there are no asterisks. To think, the agent uses a language model: GLM by Z.ai, through OpenRouter. The text of a request goes there and comes back as an answer. When the agent searches the web, the query goes to a search engine, and when it answers with a voice note, Microsoft's service reads the text aloud. Messages to the bot travel through Telegram's servers, like any other chat. And the machine runs in a data centre that I rent. I don't read people's conversations and don't intend to, but trust is part of this deal, and it's better to say so up front.
So why me, if you can install Hermes yourself? You can. It's an evening of VPS, Docker, BotFather, keys and logs, and after that the updates and the Saturday crashes. I wanted it to take one button for someone who has never opened a terminal. Press it, and a minute later someone of your own says hello.
For now it's a beta: free, with a model budget of $10 a month. When there's a price, I'll write it right here, in one line.
I'm not building another productivity tool or another chat with a neural network. There are plenty of those, and many are good. I'm making sure there's someone of your own in your phone, and that everything it knows about you belongs to you.
— the maker of svoy