Voice replies

Turn on voice replies

It’s a lot easier and faster to talk to Hermes using voice and have it reply by voice too.

To set it up, go to your Telegram chat with Hermes and say:

Turn on voice replies.

Hermes may restart its gateway, do a bunch of searches, and run some scripts. Do not be alarmed. I usually choose Always when it asks me for permission.

After a few minutes, you should see voice replies working like this:

Congrats, Hermes can now talk to you through voice.

To talk to Hermes using your voice, hold down the microphone button in Telegram and start talking.

Select the voice

Hermes uses Edge TTS by default. You do not have to know what that means other than that it is free.

If you do not like the default female voice, ask Hermes:

What other Edge voice options are available?

It should give you a list of options. Try different ones until you find the one you like:

Optimize voice replies

There are a few optimizations I like to make by asking Hermes directly.

If Hermes keeps showing noisy system messages, say:

Stop showing all these system messages: [screenshot of all the system messages]

This should get rid of the system messages Hermes shows by default so it feels more like talking to a person.

If you want Hermes to stop sending text alongside voice, say:

Reply in voice only until I tell you otherwise.

This should make Hermes reply in voice only. If you want it to switch back to text, just say:

Switch back to only text replies now.

Other shortcut commands

You can also use these commands to control Hermes voice directly, but I usually just tell it what to do in natural language.

Your Hermes bot can talk back now. Next, connect it to Google Workspace.