Schedule Tasks with Natural Language
Key Points
- ✓Type: 'Every day at 9am...'
- ✓Auto-converts to cron
- ✓Notifications via any platform
- ✓Flexible scheduling
- ✓Chain tasks into workflows
- ✓Timezone-aware scheduling
How It Works
- 1Tell Hermes in plain English
- 2Hermes creates cron rule
- 3Task runs on schedule
- 4You get notified on your preferred platform
Real-World Use Cases
Daily Briefing Reports
"Every morning at 8am, pull my GitHub notifications, check my calendar, and send me a summary on Telegram." Hermes schedules this as a cron job, runs it unattended, and sends a structured briefing to your phone daily.
Nightly Data Backups
"Back up my project databases every night at 2am and notify me on Slack if anything fails." Hermes creates the workflow, runs it on schedule, and only pings you on failure — silent success is the default.
Weekly Automated Audits
Schedule weekly security scans, dependency updates, or code quality checks. Chain multiple tools into a single scheduled workflow — browser automation, shell commands, API calls — all triggered on your schedule.
Cross-Platform Scheduled Reminders
"Every Friday at 4pm, remind me to do my weekly review on Signal." Timezone-aware, platform-aware, and persistent across restarts. No app to keep open — the gateway runs it.
Under the Hood
Hermes's natural language scheduler uses LLM parsing to convert plain English schedules into valid cron expressions, then stores them in the gateway's internal scheduler. The scheduler is timezone-aware using the system timezone or a per-job override, and handles edge cases like 'every last Friday of the month' or 'every 2 hours on weekdays' that standard cron notation makes awkward.
Scheduled tasks are full Hermes sessions — they have access to every tool, skill, and memory available in a normal interactive session. A scheduled task can browse the web, execute code, call APIs, manipulate files, and send notifications via any configured platform. Tasks can be chained: the output of one scheduled step becomes the input to the next, enabling multi-stage automated workflows without any glue code.
The scheduler persists across gateway restarts using the SQLite state database. Missed runs (due to downtime) are tracked and can be configured to either catch up or skip, depending on the task's idempotency requirements. Notifications on completion, failure, or timeout route through whichever messaging platform you configure per job — so a nightly backup can notify to Slack while a morning briefing goes to Telegram. The gateway is the always-on process that makes this work; deploy it on a VPS (Hetzner, DigitalOcean, any Linux host) and your automations run even when your laptop is off.