Controlling Home Assistant conversationally with Hermes

Put a conversational agent in front of Home Assistant so questions like the kitchen temperature or turning off downstairs lights are faster to ask than to find in a dense dashboard.

Hermes Intermediate Copied: 0

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Requirements

Hermes ships four built-in Home Assistant tools: ha_list_entities, ha_get_state, ha_list_services, and ha_call_service. Given a long-lived Home Assistant token, the agent can discover your devices, read state, and call any service Home Assistant exposes, covering lights, climate, media players, scenes, and automations through HA's service registry.
In Home Assistant, go to your user profile and Long-Lived Access Tokens, then create a token.
Home Assistant tools are built in and enabled via hermes tools.
A long-lived access token from Home Assistant.

How to use

The agent has full control — treat the HA token like any other secret, and revoke it in HA's UI if the Hermes host is compromised.

For voice, pair this with the Telegram or Discord gateway so you can message things like turning off the lights from your phone without opening the HA app.

In Home Assistant, open your user profile, go to Long-Lived Access Tokens, and create a token.
Configure Hermes.

   hermes config set homeassistant.url "http://homeassistant.local:8123"
   hermes config set homeassistant.token "YOUR_LONG_LIVED_TOKEN"

Or in .env:

   HASS_URL=http://homeassistant.local:8123
   HASS_TOKEN=YOUR_LONG_LIVED_TOKEN

Enable the HA tool group.

   hermes tools         # interactive: enable the home-assistant group

Test.

   hermes
   > What's the temperature in the living room?
   > Turn off all downstairs lights.
   > What scenes are available?

Prompts

Exploration first — let the agent discover what it's working with:

List every entity in the "climate" and "light" domains so I can see
what's controllable. Then tell me which lights are currently on.

Automation-style:

If the living room temperature drops below 19°C after sunset, turn on
the fireplace scene. Check current state and confirm whether this is
already active.

Source: aliaihub/awesome-hermes-usecases and its contributors. License: CC-BY-4.0. Source license notice.

Translation and editorial adaptation by ClawCases.

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Controlling Home Assistant conversationally with Hermes

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