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Set up Hermes in Earkeep

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Earkeep runs the agents you already use, inside the app, against the meeting in front of you. Hermes, the open-source agent from Nous Research, is one of ten built in. It ships its own protocol server, so no Node and no adapter package are involved.

Install it

Earkeep does not install agents. It runs the one you already have.

shell 
curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash

Check it landed:

shell 
hermes --version

Hermes also ships desktop installers. The Hermes Agent site is the reference for those and for the model configuration below.

Set up model access

Hermes is a harness rather than a model, so before it can do anything it needs to know which model it is calling and with what credentials. Run it once in a terminal and complete its own onboarding, which is where that gets configured.

If it wants an API key, set it in your shell profile rather than in a single terminal window. Earkeep launches agents through your login shell precisely so that the environment they get matches the one your terminal gets, and an export that only exists in one open window is not part of that.

Earkeep never stores or reads those credentials. They belong to Hermes and to your shell.

Confirm Earkeep sees it

  1. Open Earkeep and press Settings, at the bottom of the left rail.
  2. Go to Agents.
  3. The Hermes card should read Installed with its version number.

Earkeep starts it in the protocol server mode Hermes provides:

shell 
hermes acp

That is a mode Hermes documents for editor integrations, so the same command is what an editor would use. Nothing about it is specific to Earkeep.

Use it on a meeting

  1. Open a saved meeting.
  2. In the agent panel, start a New session and pick Hermes and a working directory.
  3. Type what you want, or start from one of the suggestion cards, which come from your own prompts in Settings → Templates.

Your other meetings come wired in. Earkeep offers its own MCP server to the session automatically, so the agent can search and read your saved meetings without you configuring anything.

If something goes wrong

"Not found", but it works in your terminal. Almost always the path. Earkeep probes through your login shell, so open a fresh terminal window and run hermes --version: if that fails too, the install did not finish wiring itself in.

The session starts and immediately ends. Run hermes acp in a terminal on its own. If it exits there, the problem is Hermes' configuration rather than Earkeep, and its onboarding is the place to fix it.

No signed-in badge appears. That is expected. Only two agents in the roster expose a reliable non-interactive check, and Hermes is not one of them, so Earkeep treats it as ready once the binary is there.

Related

Frequently asked questions

Do I need Node for this one?

No. Hermes ships its own protocol server, so unlike the npx-backed agents it needs nothing from the Node ecosystem.

Does this keep everything on my device?

Earkeep's part does: capture, transcription and storage never leave your machine. What Hermes does depends on the model you configured it with, which is unusually a choice you get to make here, local models included.

What is ACP?

The Agent Client Protocol, a standard way for an application to drive an agent. Earkeep integrates with the protocol rather than with ten separate agents, which is why any other agent that speaks it works the same way.

Can I run more than one agent on the same meeting?

Yes. A meeting can hold several sessions, each with its own agent and working directory.

Where do the session logs go?

Beside the meeting, as plain files on your own disk, one per session.

The agent comes to the meeting

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