How much power does it use running all the time?

About 20 W — 15 to 20 watts typical, roughly a fifth of a lightbulb. Left on permanently that is a rounding error on a household bill.

No. It has a single managed fan and it is quiet, but a page that told you a computer with active cooling makes no noise would be lying to you about the first thing you would notice. It is inaudible in a room with anything else happening in it, and audible in a silent one.

How do I talk to it when I am not home?

Telegram, which works from anywhere without exposing anything to the internet. There is also a web UI on your local network, and an OpenAI-compatible endpoint for the tools you already use.

An always-on AI assistant, awake at 3am with your laptop shut

The assistant you pay for lives in a tab. Close the lid and the research job dies, the scheduled thing never runs, and the inbox waits for you. An always-on assistant is one that does not stop when you do.

The jobs worth automating are the slow ones

Anything an assistant can finish while you watch, you could have done yourself. The work that actually returns your time is the work that takes forty minutes, or runs at 6am, or has to check something every hour until it changes — and every one of those is incompatible with a machine that sleeps.

That is the whole argument for a separate box. HermesBox sits on your network drawing about 20 W, which is cheap enough to leave running permanently and quiet enough to forget about.

What people actually leave running

email — triage, drafts, follow-ups that actually go out; browser — fills forms, pulls data, clicks through the boring bit; research — long jobs that run while the laptop is shut; reminders — it messages you, not the other way round; dev work — reviews, refactors, scripted chores on a schedule.

None of it is a demo. It is the middle of the week, handled by something that does not need you awake for it.

It messages you, not the other way round

The interface that matters for an always-on assistant is not a chat window you have to open. It is Telegram, because a machine that can start the conversation is a different tool from one that waits to be prompted.

So the overnight research lands as a message. The thing that needed a decision asks for one. The job that failed says so at the time rather than the next time you happen to look.

Why not just leave a laptop on

You can, and for a week it works. Then it sleeps on a lid close, or an update reboots it, or you take it to a meeting, or the fans spin up at 2am, or it turns out a laptop drawing sixty watts to idle is not something you want to do for a year.

A dedicated machine is not faster than your laptop and does not pretend to be. It is simply always there, at 20 W, which is the only property that matters for this job.

Common questions

How much power does it use running all the time?: About 20 W — 15 to 20 watts typical, roughly a fifth of a lightbulb. Left on permanently that is a rounding error on a household bill.
Is it silent?: No. It has a single managed fan and it is quiet, but a page that told you a computer with active cooling makes no noise would be lying to you about the first thing you would notice. It is inaudible in a room with anything else happening in it, and audible in a silent one.
How do I talk to it when I am not home?: Telegram, which works from anywhere without exposing anything to the internet. There is also a web UI on your local network, and an OpenAI-compatible endpoint for the tools you already use.