How-To Series · Module 4: Eyes, Ears, Voice
Wake Word: Hey Hermes
Say hey Hermes and it starts listening, hands-free.
After this videoYour agent wakes on a spoken phrase, fully on device
The wake word turns Hermes into a hands-free assistant across the CLI, TUI, and desktop app. With one setting on, Hermes listens in the background for a spoken trigger phrase, starts a fresh session, opens the microphone, and captures your command through the normal voice pipeline. Detection runs entirely on device and is off by default. Start with /wake on, check state with /wake status, and configure engines and sensitivity in config.yaml under the wake_word key.
About these resources. This episode explains the wake word subsystem in Hermes. The Sources block names the Hermes docs page that backs every claim.
New words here · Plain English
one sentence each · full glossaryWake wordA spoken trigger phrase that wakes Hermes into a hands-free session, like Hey Siri or Alexa.
OpenWakeWordA free, local hotword engine that ships a bundled hey hermes model and works out of the box.
SherpaA free, open-vocabulary wake engine that detects any typed phrase with zero training.
SensitivityThe detection threshold. Higher means fewer false triggers, lower means fewer missed wake words.
Sources · What this video distills
1 docs page · every command below traces to one of themCommands shown · Copy and paste
each shows the source doc it came from/wake on/wake status/wake off