I've tested Hermes Agent for my AI agent Comparison after hearing about it from my techie office roommate.
He's my direct line to any ahead-of-its-time AI hype. For my AI agent research I want to focus on tools a non-technical
person can easily command through a chat window. Rather than fumbling around and eventually giving up due to tech
overwhelm, I am looking for tools for small businesses. I've invented a term for this: pay and prompt.
When I first tested Hermes Agent I wasn't sure if this applies to Hermes Agent. But we'll get to that later in the conclusion.
First things first, which is: how do I even test tools like Hermes Agent?
This is my trial task, which is a Backlink exchange outreacher:
\- Find blogs that mention AI tools like Gamma or ElevenLabs
\- Check that the site has a similar authority score (or DR) to mine
\- Find the editor's email address
\- Write a link exchange email referencing their article and my relevant review page
\- Save it as a draft in my inbox ready for me to review and send manually
The most difficult parts are typically Authority score retrival from a website like ahrefs.com and drafting an email directly in my inbox. Hardly any of the tools were able to do one or the other. Let's see if Hermes Agent can do it all.
Setting up Hermes Agent Step by Step
- I downloaded the Hermes Agent app
- Logged in via my Google Account
- Chose the free plan on their website, it connected automatically in the backend
- I get an error message because I chose a free plan and the preset LLM requires credits
- I change the model, but keep getting the same error message
So now I have 2 options:
I can either add a few bucks on their Nous Portal or I can connect openrouter via API key.
I'm choosing the first because I promised that you wouldn't have to be technical to use the AI agents I recommend.
Minimum top-up is $10. Ah, now I see why you saved my credit card details in the beginning when I signed up for the free plan.
Face palm.
The Hermes Agent Test
After paying its smooth Hermes sailing and I can finally prompt the agent from a chat window. Let's go! It does quite well with the research of competitor pages, and also the DR is not a problem for Hermes Agent. It gets bumpy when I ask it to draft the emails straight in my Gmail inbox. Apparently, integrations aren't quite there yet, and I would have to go through my least favorite setup: OAuth credential stuff in Google Cloud Console. With this one I ripped my hair out before, so no thanks! For now, I'd rather stick to Hyperagent, where all of this annoying stuff is done by itself (by Composio actually).And I'm kind of relieved that I created my online course "AI Agents for Small Business: Automate Without Coding" based on Hyperagent (Review here).
Imagine I had produced a course for a month, put all my insights about what to delegate, how to save credits, etc., based on an agent platform that was outdated just after production 🪇 Lucky me!
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