Messaging Gateway
Chat with Hermes from Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, SMS, Email, Home Assistant, Mattermost, Matrix, DingTalk, Feishu/Lark, WeCom, Weixin, BlueBubbles (iMessage), QQ, Yuanbao, Microsoft Teams, LINE, ntfy, or your browser. The gateway is a single background process that connects to all your configured platforms, handles sessions, runs cron jobs, and delivers voice messages.
For the full voice feature set — including CLI microphone mode, spoken replies in messaging, and Discord voice-channel conversations — see Voice Mode and Use Voice Mode with Hermes.
Bots need both a model provider and tool providers (TTS, web). A Nous Portal subscription bundles all of them.
Platform Comparison
| Platform | Voice | Images | Files | Threads | Reactions | Typing | Streaming |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Telegram | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | — | ✅ | ✅ |
| Discord | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Slack | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Google Chat | — | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | — | ✅ | — |
| — | ✅ | ✅ | — | — | ✅ | ✅ | |
| WhatsApp Cloud API | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | — | — | ✅ | — |
| Signal | — | ✅ | ✅ | — | — | ✅ | — |
| SMS | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| — | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | — | — | — | |
| Home Assistant | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Mattermost | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | — | ✅ | ✅ |
| Matrix | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| DingTalk | — | ✅ | ✅ | — | ✅ | — | ✅ |
| Feishu/Lark | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| WeCom | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | — | — | — | — |
| WeCom Callback | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Weixin | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | — | — | ✅ | — |
| BlueBubbles | — | ✅ | ✅ | — | ✅ | ✅ | — |
| Photon (iMessage) | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | — | ✅ | ✅ | — |
| ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | — | — | ✅ | — | |
| Yuanbao | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | — | — | ✅ | ✅ |
| Microsoft Teams | — | ✅ | — | ✅ | — | ✅ | — |
| LINE | — | ✅ | ✅ | — | — | ✅ | — |
| ntfy | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Raft | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| IRC | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Buzz | — | ✅ | — | ✅ | — | — | — |
| SimpleX | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | — | — | ✅ | — |
Voice = TTS audio replies and/or voice message transcription. Images = send/receive images. Files = send/receive file attachments. Threads = threaded conversations. Reactions = emoji reactions on messages. Typing = typing indicator while processing. Streaming = progressive message updates via editing.
Hermes Relay (experimental) is not a chat platform itself — it is a connector system that fronts platforms like Discord, Telegram, Slack, and WhatsApp through an external connector that owns the platform credentials. Capabilities (media, native approval/clarify prompts, reactions, threads, typing, streaming) are negotiated per connector at handshake rather than fixed in the table above.
Architecture
Each platform adapter receives messages, routes them through a per-chat session store, and dispatches them to the AIAgent for processing. The gateway also runs the cron scheduler, ticking every 60 seconds to execute any due jobs.
Intentional Silence Tokens
For group chats, hooks, and automation flows, Hermes supports explicit silence tokens. If the agent's final response is exactly one supported token, the gateway suppresses outbound delivery and sends nothing to the chat.
Supported tokens:
[SILENT]SILENTNO_REPLYNO REPLY
Whitespace and case are normalized, but the whole final response must be the token. A sentence like "Use [SILENT] when nothing changed" is delivered normally.
Silence is a delivery decision only. Hermes keeps the assistant silence turn in the session transcript, so the conversation still alternates normally:
user: side-channel chatter
assistant: [SILENT] # stored, not delivered
user: next message
Failed turns still surface as errors; Hermes does not hide failures just because the text resembles a silence token.
Quick Setup
The easiest way to configure messaging platforms is the interactive wizard:
hermes gateway setup # Interactive setup for all messaging platforms
This walks you through configuring each platform with arrow-key selection, shows which platforms are already configured, and offers to start/restart the gateway when done.
Gateway Commands
hermes gateway # Run in foreground