Setup
Build Your Own AI Assistant That Knows Your Business
An AI that stays on, remembers you and can do tasks. Set up with Hermes, a free open-source program: a home, a model, memory, tools, and a way to text it from your phone.
Free. No email, no signup — the link downloads it.
Open hermes-agent.nousresearch.com
Stuck on a step? Ask in the community
A normal AI chat forgets you when you close the window and can only talk, so you retype your offers, prices and tone into every new chat and have to sit at your computer to use it. An assistant adds three things: it keeps notes about you and your business, it can use tools, and you can message it from your phone. This guide builds one in six steps with Hermes, a free open-source program from Nous Research — install it on your own computer, choose the AI it thinks with (Claude, ChatGPT or others), tell it about your business once, connect Telegram, give it a job that runs on a schedule, and decide how to keep it on all day.
What's inside
- The program is free, the model is not — what you need to have ready before step 1
- The one message that teaches it your business, and why you test memory in a fresh chat
- Connecting Telegram by QR code, locked to your account so nobody else can message it
- Keeping it on all day: leave a computer running for free, or rent a small server