Hermes Home Assistant Voice Integration

What Hermes Home Assistant Voice Integration does

The repository has three pieces. The custom_components/hermes integration adds Home Assistant services, status sensors and a Lovelace action bar. The plugins/home_assistant plugin gives Hermes tools for entity search, state lookup, service calls, bulk control and scene or script discovery. The plugins/voice_stack plugin adds wake-word, speech-to-text and text-to-speech helpers, exposed through tools such as voice_enable, voice_speak and voice_status.

Service calls pass through safety controls: blocked service domains, an optional allow-list and JSON-line audit logging. Voice events that start in Home Assistant travel over a documented WebSocket protocol in docs/ws-protocol.md. The README is candid that the defaults are not always cloud-free. Edge TTS needs the network while Piper works offline, and Porcupine needs a Picovoice access key while OpenWakeWord is the open-source option. The README describes release v0.0.15.

Key features

• Hermes tools such as ha_search_entities, ha_get_state and ha_call_service
• Compound helpers including turn_off_all_except and ha_bulk_control
• Voice tools voice_enable, voice_disable, voice_speak and voice_status
• Blocked service domains, optional allow-list and JSON-line audit log
• Status sensors and a Lovelace action bar inside Home Assistant
• Configurable wake-word, speech-to-text and text-to-speech engines

When to use it

• Asking Hermes whether the kitchen light is on and having it switch lights, scenes or climate
• Running a wake-word to speech to LLM to speaker loop through a Home Assistant media player
• Auditing every service call Hermes makes in a home setup

Who it is for: Home Assistant users who run Hermes Agent and want it to understand and control their home by chat or voice.

How it fits with Hermes Agent

Built for Hermes Agent: two of its three parts are Hermes plugins, and the third is a Home Assistant integration that connects back to Hermes.

Requirements: A Home Assistant instance and Hermes Agent; Porcupine wake-word needs a Picovoice access key, and media_player playback needs audio that Home Assistant can reach

Note: The Home Assistant add-on is an early scaffold, and the stack is fully local only when local speech engines and a local model are chosen.

FAQ