Voice skills

A voice skill is a Hermes skill written to be heard: it answers in a few spoken sentences. Install them from Hark's settings, or ask Hermes: "install the weather skill." Anyone can write one.

herdr-voice

herdr-voice runs coding agents in Herdr by voice: Claude Code, Codex, omp and any other agent Herdr supports. It needs Herdr on the computer Hermes runs on.

"Create a new Claude session for hark."
"Tell the hark Claude to fix the failing test, and let me know when it's done."
"What's waiting on me?"
"Where did we do the swipe fix?"
"Merge it once CI passes."

A new session opens in the repo's Herdr workspace, named after its task, so you can refer to it by what it's doing. Hermes doesn't sit waiting while an agent works: you keep talking, and it tells you when the agent is done or stuck, with one report when you started several at once. "What's waiting on me?" goes through every agent and tells you which have a question for you and which finished with something you haven't heard.

Agents you started yourself at your desk get the same treatment with its desk-alerts Herdr plugin: they tell you when they finish or get stuck while you're away, and you approve their permission prompts from a card in Hark.

Write your own

The user is listening, often away from the screen. Have the skill tell Hermes to answer in two to four sentences, say what changed and what's left, and never read out terminal output, file contents or long lists. Speech-to-text mishears names, so list the likely mishearings of yours. herdr-voice is a worked example.

Describe it to Hark

Any Hermes skill works in Hark. To give Hark more to show, add a metadata.hark block to your SKILL.md frontmatter; every field is optional. Hermes ignores it; Hark reads it.

---
name: weather
description: "Weather and forecasts, in a sentence or two"
metadata:
  hark:
    voice: true
    summary: "Says the forecast in a sentence or two."
    requires:
      command: curl
    phrases:
      - "what's the weather tomorrow?"
      - "do I need an umbrella?"
    routing: "For weather and forecasts, load the weather skill."
---

voice: true lists the skill under Voice skills in Hark however it was installed.
summary: One sentence shown under the skill's name, up to 120 characters. Without it, Hark shows the description.
requires.command: A command the skill needs on the computer Hermes runs on. Hark shows it, and Hermes says so if it's missing after installing.
phrases: Up to six things to say, shown as examples.
routing: When Hermes should use the skill, up to 300 characters. While the skill is installed, Hark adds this sentence to every turn, marked as coming from your skill, and shows it in the skill's details. Hermes' skill index sees only the first 60 characters of description, so this is how a skill wins over a built-in one.

Hermes shows the model only the first 60 characters of description, so put what matters first.

List it

Hark's list of voice skills is the public repo tensor-systems/voice-skills. To add yours, open a pull request with an entry pointing at your skill's folder on GitHub. A check makes sure your SKILL.md can be fetched and its name matches. Skills Hark's maintainers have looked over are labelled reviewed; the rest are labelled community.

Listing is optional. Anyone can install a skill by its GitHub path, from Settings → Voice skills in Hark or by giving Hermes the path. Either way, Hermes installs it as a community skill and scans it first.