How to use Hermes to get a nightly digest of your meetings
Dylan de Heer
Some days are wall-to-wall calls: a coaching session, two client check-ins, a pitch. Weeve catches all of it. Every recording is transcribed and summarised on your Mac before you've refilled your coffee. But five good summaries you never re-read are worth about as much as no summaries at all.
Here's the fix this guide builds: every evening at nine, a message arrives on your phone. One line per meeting. Every decision made that day. Your action items, separated from everyone else's. And one "thread to watch", the unresolved question most likely to cause trouble later. Total reading time: about a minute.
The assistant doing the work is Hermes, a free, open-source AI agent from Nous Research. It runs quietly on your Mac (or a small server), reaches you through Telegram, WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, or Signal, and has a built-in scheduler you talk to in plain English. No cron syntax, no code.
Before you start
You'll need Hermes installed. Their site offers a one-command installer and a setup wizard that connects your chat app; expect 30 to 45 minutes if this is your first time with this kind of tool. You'll also want Weeve's auto-generate summaries switched on in Settings, so every meeting gets notes without you asking.
Step 1: Give Hermes a path it can hold in its instructions
In Weeve, open Settings → Data & Storage, click Change folder, and choose a new folder called Weeve in your home folder. Inside you will find Weeve → Users → a folder with a long name → Recordings, one file per meeting holding the title, date, speaker names, and the summary.
The reason to do this for Hermes specifically is different from the reason other setups give. Hermes does not watch the folder or hold a connection to it. It reads a path that is written down in its standing instructions, in plain text, and it reads it fresh every evening. That makes the path a piece of configuration rather than a runtime detail, and it means two things. A path under ~/Library/Application Support with spaces and a long random account folder is one you will get wrong when you type it, and a path you later change breaks the digest silently, with no error, just a message that stops arriving.
So pick the folder now, before you write any instructions, and keep it. If you ever do move it, the digest instruction has to be updated by hand in the same breath.
Step 2: Introduce Hermes to the folder
Hermes takes standing instructions as plain text. Give it this (paste as-is):
The "ready" detail matters. Weeve creates the file when a recording starts and fills it in as processing finishes, so the file's presence and the meeting being done are two different moments. For a 9 p.m. digest this hardly ever bites, since everything from the day finished processing hours ago, but the rule keeps the edge cases clean.
Step 3: Ask for the digest
This is the whole "programming" step. Tell Hermes, in chat:
Two lines there earn their keep. "Stay silent" means no empty digests on quiet days. A message that arrives when there's nothing to say trains you to ignore it. And the language line matters because Weeve summarises meetings in the language they were held in, so your Dutch standup produces Dutch notes; letting the digest match beats a clumsy translation of your own conversation.
The part that gets better on its own
Hermes has a habit other assistants lack: after doing a job a few times, it can turn the routine into a written "skill" it keeps and reuses. Ask it: "Turn the Weeve digest into a skill." From then on the procedure is documented and consistent, and it becomes a building block. "Use the Weeve skill on the last month and tell me which meetings never produced a single action item" becomes a one-line request. Most calendars do not enjoy answering that question.
Other requests that work well once the folder is connected: a Friday "promise audit" listing every commitment from the week that nobody has mentioned since; a morning-briefing version at 7:30 covering yesterday; separate digests per project sent to different channels.
Choosing the model behind the digest
This is the decision that matters most on this page, and it is one the other Weeve setups do not ask you to make. Hermes is model-agnostic: it thinks using whichever model you point it at, and that choice decides whether your meeting summaries leave your Mac every evening at nine.
A cloud model gives you the best writing quality. It also means that every night, the summaries of every meeting you had that day are sent to that provider so they can be condensed into a paragraph. For internal standups that is unremarkable. For a day of coaching sessions or client calls it is a standing nightly disclosure that nobody in those conversations agreed to, and it is worth noticing that Weeve deliberately kept the recording and summarising on your machine only for that content to be uploaded at the last step.
A local model keeps the whole loop on your hardware. The digest reads slightly more mechanically, which matters less than you would think for a format that is mostly a list of decisions and action items. If your meetings involve anyone's confidences, this is the consistent choice, and it is the one that makes the setup match the reason you were using Weeve in the first place.
The middle path, if you want cloud quality and less exposure: the digest only ever needs the summaries, never the word-for-word transcripts. The instructions above already respect that, and it is worth keeping them that way rather than widening what Hermes reads later for convenience.
When the digest does not arrive
Silence is ambiguous here, which is the one real weakness of the "stay silent on quiet days" rule. Three checks, in order.
Ask Hermes directly. "Did you run the Weeve digest last night, and what did you find?" It keeps a record of its scheduled runs and will usually tell you it ran and found nothing.
Check the date logic. "Today's meetings" is resolved in the timezone Hermes thinks it is in, not necessarily yours. A digest that fires at 21:00 but calculates "today" in UTC will miss an evening call. Asking Hermes what it believes the current date and timezone to be settles this in one message.
Check the path. If you moved the Weeve library after writing the standing instruction, Hermes is reading a folder that no longer exists and will report finding no meetings rather than reporting an error.
Where this sits among the alternatives
Of the five ways to connect Weeve to something else, this is the only one that reaches you when you are not at your Mac, and the only one that gets better at its own job over time through the skill mechanism above. That is what you are choosing it for.
It is also the only one that asks you to make a model decision, which is the trade for that reach. If you would rather nothing left the machine at all and you only need the notes filed, OpenClaw does the filing half on a heartbeat. If you want notes to appear the instant a meeting finishes rather than at nine in the evening, Claude Code builds an event-driven version that fires within seconds. If a weekly view suits you better than a nightly one, Claude Cowork turns a week into a single review with no Terminal at all. And if you would rather ask questions of your meetings than receive anything on a schedule, Codex is the shortest setup here.
Setup is an evening. The payoff is the opposite of a productivity system: nothing to maintain, nothing to remember, just a one-minute message that means no meeting slips through the cracks again.
A nightly digest is the smallest version of a much bigger idea. How we built an AI company brain at Weeve covers what the same conversations look like once they accumulate into a shared, reviewed source of truth.
The digest is only as good as what it reads. Weeve's free Starter plan produces the nightly raw material on a Mac, 10 meetings a month, summarised on the device. It needs Apple Silicon and macOS 14 or later. On Windows or a phone there is no local folder for Hermes to watch, though the browser transcriber will still transcribe a single recording without uploading it.
