Hermes Conduit 0.1.16 (UPDATE) — hands-free voice, Grok Voice, rebuilt CarPlay, and a lot more
Conduit 0.1.16 (build 177) is live on the App Store.
Yes, I literally posted the 0.1.15 update four days ago. I wasn't planning on doing this again quite this fast, but I kept finding things that voice needed before it actually felt complete. Build 162 → 177 ended up being 304 commits, then Apple somehow reviewed the thing in about six hours. So here we are.
Important: if you use the Conduit companion/notifier plugin, update it along with the app. Several of the new voice, notification, takeover, and routing features depend on newer plugin capabilities, and older versions may show as incompatible in Settings.
Short demo attached because screenshots are terrible at explaining voice.
Live Voice is the big one
0.1.15 introduced Gemini Live and GPT-Live. 0.1.16 is basically the “okay, now make this feel like an actual assistant” pass.
- Added Grok Voice as a third live voice provider alongside Gemini Live and GPT-Live
- Live Voice can hand work off to Hermes in the background while you keep talking, then bring the result back into the conversation when it's ready
- Hermes results now wait for you to finish speaking instead of barging into the middle of your sentence
- Calls can stay attached to an existing chat or Bot Chat, and typed messages in that chat can feed into the live conversation as context
- Background jobs started by a call are visible from the call screen, including their full results
- Charts, tables and images returned by Hermes can be shown directly in the Live Voice UI
- Saved calls link back to the chats and Hermes requests they came from, and saved calls can be resumed
- Live calls can be minimized instead of ended
- Phone calls and alarms pause a Live Voice conversation instead of killing it
- AirPods/headset mute gestures work with live calls
- Gemini/Grok can optionally use speaker echo cancellation so you can talk over the assistant naturally
- Added call style controls for things like greetings, tone and backchannels
Obligatory clarification because I know this comment is coming: the interesting part isn't just that AI can talk now. ChatGPT/Grok/etc already do that.
Conduit is a voice front end to your own Hermes backend — your sessions, tools, agents, files, jobs and infrastructure. The live model can delegate actual work to Hermes while the conversation keeps going.
Hands-free, Classic Voice and CarPlay
The rest of the voice stack got a pretty ridiculous amount of work too.
- Foreground wake phrases now work across voice modes
- Siri can start Voice directly on a named Hermes profile
- Classic Voice can keep listening with the phone locked
- While Hermes is still thinking, speaking can steer the running turn instead of cancelling it
- You can interrupt spoken replies naturally, including optional speaker talk-over with echo cancellation
- Read Aloud now handles long replies better, has a playback-speed control, and can continue in the background with lock-screen/headset controls
CarPlay also went from “voice works in the car” to an actual CarPlay interface: pick a chat, mute, start a new chat, view jobs and shortcuts, choose voice options, hear status sounds, and start Voice without first opening Conduit on the phone. It also does a lot more work to survive reconnects and keep the chat you selected.
And somehow there was non-voice work too
Because apparently I don't know when to stop:
- Composer overhaul with better attachments, multi-select, video support, previews, dictation and a full-screen editor for long drafts
- Quote an entire reply or selected text directly into the composer
- Move conversations between projects
- Full session menus and swipe actions inside project conversation lists
- Rename/delete projects you created and pin chats at the top of Projects
- Create, edit and delete Hermes bots directly from Conduit, including custom avatars
- Bot Chats can now host Live Voice calls
- Take over a chat when Hermes Desktop currently owns it
- Model switching now asks for confirmation when changing it would disrupt an active turn
- Custom HTTP headers for reverse proxies
- Better Cloudflare Access support for voice and Kanban live-update WebSockets
- Answered clarification questions now reload as proper cards instead of raw tool calls
- A large pass on plain-language errors, notification compatibility, chat scrolling and general reliability
Links
App Store: Hermes Conduit App - App Store
GitHub (app): kaishi00/hermes-conduit: Conduit — native SwiftUI iOS client for Hermes Agent
GitHub (notifier plugin): kaishi00/hermes-conduit-notifier: Hermes plugin for Hermes Conduit push notifications
Website: https://hermesconduit.app/
Previous 0.1.15 post: https://www.reddit.com/r/hermesagent/s/lBTWUkamz1
Still free, no ads, no tracking, and it connects directly to your own Hermes instance. Same sessions as desktop because it's the same backend/database.
Feedback and bug reports are welcome — preferably on GitHub so I can actually ask follow-up questions and keep track of them 😅