Your AI Looked Up the Source. And Checked It.

You've probably caught your AI making up a source. A confident-sounding citation that leads nowhere, or a statistic that just doesn't exist. For a nonprofit writing a grant application or a small business making a real purchasing decision, that's not a minor inconvenience. It's a liability.

What's happening

Nous Research, the independent open-source AI community behind the widely-used Hermes model family, shipped Hermes Agent v0.20.0 on August 3rd. It's MIT-licensed, free, and the two new features most worth your time are verified citations and conversational voice.

The verified-citations skill changes how Hermes handles research. Instead of generating a citation and hoping it's real, it matches every quote against the actual text of the source page before including it in the answer. If the page doesn't say it, the quote doesn't appear. There's also a fact-checking mode: hand it a document or a claim and it audits the sources for you. Useful for checking what a supplier told you, or reviewing stats in a grant brief before you submit it.

The voice feature is the other big addition. You configure a custom wake phrase (anything you want), and the detection runs entirely on your machine. No audio is streamed anywhere while it's listening. When you speak, it responds clause-by-clause as it's generating, and you can interrupt mid-sentence. Practical for a busy owner or coordinator who'd rather talk through a task than stop and type.

Try this this week

• Install it on a Mac, Linux machine, or Windows via WSL2. The shell installer takes two to three minutes:

  curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
  

• Once running, enable the research/grounded-citations skill from the skills menu.
• Ask it something you'd normally Google for work: grant eligibility requirements, a quick supplier comparison, or a policy question. Read the first citation it returns and click through to the source. The quote on the page should match what Hermes said.
• For voice, open the desktop app (no account needed, public preview since June) and set your wake word in settings. Detection stays local.

The full Hermes Agent documentation covers skill setup, the desktop app, and gateway options.

The bigger picture

A small operation can now run a private AI research assistant that actually checks its own work, and listens for its name, on a modest laptop or a cheap VPS, for free. That's the smallest working thing that does the job. No enterprise contract, no subscription, no hallucinated footnotes.