Build a Daily Briefing Bot

Imagine waking up every morning to a perfectly curated summary of the news you actually care about — delivered straight to your phone. No scrolling through feeds, no noise, just the stories that matter, ready with your coffee.

That’s exactly what you’ll build today: a personal briefing bot that runs itself. It searches the web, summarizes the top stories, and sends the result to your Telegram or Discord. And the best part? No code required.

What We’re Building

Here’s the flow:

8:00 AM — A cron scheduler triggers your job
Hermes spins up a fresh agent session with your prompt
Web search pulls the latest news on your topics
Summarization distills it into a clean briefing format
Delivery sends the briefing to your Telegram or Discord

The whole thing runs hands-free. You just read your briefing with your morning coffee.

Prerequisites

Before we start, make sure you have:

Hermes Agent installed — see the Installation guide
Gateway running — the gateway daemon handles cron execution:

hermes gateway install   # Install as a user service
sudo hermes gateway install --system   # Linux servers: boot-time system service
# or
hermes gateway           # Run in foreground

Firecrawl API key — set FIRECRAWL_API_KEY in your environment for web search
Messaging configured (optional but recommended) — Telegram or Discord set up with a home channel

No messaging? No problem. You can still follow this tutorial using deliver: "local". Briefings will be saved to ~/.hermes/cron/output/ and you can read them anytime.

Step 1: Test the Workflow Manually

Before automating anything, let’s make sure the briefing works. Start a chat session:

hermes

Then enter this prompt:

Search for the latest news about AI agents and open source LLMs.
Summarize the top 3 stories in a concise briefing format with links.

Hermes will search the web, read through results, and produce something like:

☀️ Your AI Briefing — March 8, 2026

1. Qwen 3 Released with 235B Parameters
   Alibaba's latest open-weight model matches GPT-4.5 on several
   benchmarks while remaining fully open source.
   → https://qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwen3/

2. LangChain Launches Agent Protocol Standard
   A new open standard for agent-to-agent communication gains
   adoption from 15 major frameworks in its first week.
   → https://blog.langchain.dev/agent-protocol/

3. EU AI Act Enforcement Begins for General-Purpose Models
   The first compliance deadlines hit, with open source models
   receiving exemptions under the 10M parameter threshold.
   → https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/updates/

---
3 stories • Sources searched: 8 • Generated by Hermes Agent

If this works, you’re ready to automate it.

Tip: Iterate on the format. Try different prompts until you get output you love. Add instructions like “use emoji headers” or “keep each summary under 2 sentences.” Whatever you settle on goes into the cron job.

Step 2: Create the Cron Job

Now let’s schedule this to run automatically every morning. You have two options.

Before creating cron jobs, ensure Hermes has a default model and provider configured globally. If you want a specific job to use different values, set explicit per-job model/provider overrides when creating it.

Option A: Natural Language (in chat)

Just tell Hermes what you want:

Every morning at 8am, search the web for the latest news about AI agents
and open source LLMs. Summarize the top 3 stories in a concise briefing
with links. Use a friendly, professional tone. Deliver to telegram.

Hermes will create the cron job for you using the unified cronjob tool.

Option B: CLI Slash Command

Use the /cron command for more control:

/cron add "0 8 * * *" "Search the web for the latest news about AI agents and open source LLMs. Find at least 5 recent articles from the past 24 hours. Summarize the top 3 most important stories in a concise daily briefing format. For each story include: a clear headline, a 2-sentence summary, and the source URL. Use a friendly, professional tone. Format with emoji bullet points and end with a total story count."

The Golden Rule: Self-Contained Prompts

Critical concept: Cron jobs run in a completely fresh session — no memory of your previous conversations, no context about what you “set up earlier.” Your prompt must contain everything the agent needs to do the job.

Bad prompt:

Do my usual morning briefing.

Good prompt:

Search the web for the latest news about AI agents and open source LLMs.
Find at least 5 recent articles from the past 24 hours. Summarize the
top 3 most important stories in a concise daily briefing format. For each
story include: a clear headline, a 2-sentence summary, and the source URL.
Use a friendly, professional tone. Format with emoji bullet points.

The good prompt is specific about what to search, how many articles, what format, and what tone. It’s everything the agent needs in one shot.

Step 3: Customize the Briefing

Once the basic briefing works, you can get creative.

Multi-Topic Briefings

Cover several areas in one briefing:

/cron add "0 8 * * *" "Create a morning briefing covering three topics. For each topic, search the web for recent news from the past 24 hours and summarize the top 2 stories with links.

Topics:
1. AI and machine learning — focus on open source models and agent frameworks
2. Cryptocurrency — focus on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and regulatory news
3. Space exploration — focus on SpaceX, NASA, and commercial space

Format as a clean briefing with clear section headers for each topic. Use emoji bullet points and end with a total story count."

Change the Time or Frequency

Want a weekly digest instead? Just change the cron expression:

/cron add "0 9 * * 1" "Search for the latest AI research papers from the past week. Summarize the 5 most significant findings in a technical briefing format..."

That’s 9 AM every Monday — perfect for a weekly deep dive.

Wrap Up

You now have a fully automated briefing bot that:

Searches the web for fresh news
Summarizes it into a clean format
Delivers it to your messaging app
Runs on a schedule — no manual work

The same pattern works for any recurring research task: market reports, competitor tracking, sports scores, or even a daily joke. Just remember the golden rule: make your prompt self-contained, and Hermes will handle the rest.

Go ahead — set up your briefing bot and enjoy your morning coffee with the news that matters to you.

Keep reading: Hermes ntfy — Want the same briefing pushed to your phone? Hermes ntfy is the lightest way to do it.