May 27, 2026 · 6 min

Turn your Hermes Agent into a Telegram bot

One of the best reasons to host your own Hermes Agent is that it stops living inside a browser tab. Hermes ships with a messaging gateway for half a dozen chat apps. Telegram is the quickest one to set up: a bot token, two config edits, and your agent is reachable from any phone with no app to install.

This is the actual end-to-end walkthrough, from creating the bot in Telegram to having a real conversation with your agent on the way to work. Assumes you already have a meraGPT box running. If not, the Quickstart gets you there in about three minutes.

1. Create the Telegram bot

Open Telegram and start a chat with @BotFather. Type /newbot. BotFather asks for a display name (any string) and a username (must end in bot). When it’s done it replies with a token that looks like 1234567890:AAH.... Copy it.

While you’re there, send your bot any message (it won’t reply yet). Then in another tab visit https://api.telegram.org/bot<TOKEN>/getUpdates and look at the JSON. The number under result[].message.chat.id is your chat id. You’ll need that too.

2. Tell Hermes about the bot

Open your meraGPT dashboard, click Open your agent, then go to the CONFIG tab. Scroll to the Gateway section and pick Telegram. Paste the bot token. Add your chat id to the allowed-senders list so the agent only talks to you.

Save. Hit Restart Gateway from the system menu in the sidebar. Within a few seconds the indicator next to GATEWAY STATUS should flip from OFF to ON.

3. Say hi

Open the bot chat in Telegram and say “hello”. You should get a streaming reply within a couple of seconds, same Hermes you’ve been chatting with in the web dashboard, same memory, same skills, same slash commands. The agent on your box is now reachable from your lock screen.

What it’s actually good for

The interesting moments happen when you’re away from your desk. You ping the bot a question on the train and because Hermes shares one memory across surfaces, it already knows who Sam is and what last week’s thing was about. Reminders feel natural too: “remind me Thursday at 4 to call the dentist” just lands as a cron job and pops back into the same Telegram thread when it fires. Forward an article or a screenshot and ask for a one-line summary; the vision-capable models on OpenRouter take it from there. The box is always on, so anything of the form “watch this and ping me when it changes” works without you keeping a tab open.

A couple of gotchas

Telegram caps a single message at 4096 characters, so long replies arrive as a thread. Hermes handles the chunking itself, you just have to scroll. The allow-list is the one thing you don’t want to skip: a public bot with no allow-list will happily talk to anyone who finds it and burn through your LLM credits doing it. File uploads work for images and small PDFs; anything bigger is easier dropped into the web dashboard.

Where to go next

You can stack gateways. Slack, WhatsApp and Discord drop in from the same Config tab. The daily inbox brief recipe pairs naturally with Telegram, just point its delivery to your bot and the morning report shows up next to your other messages. The official Hermes docs walk through the gateway code if you want to roll your own.