Descriptions:
David Ondrej demonstrates how to give an AI agent a working phone number by connecting the Hermes agent to Vapi through a single MCP installation. The result is an autonomous voice agent capable of making and receiving real phone calls—finding businesses, booking appointments, and chasing leads—on its own schedule via cron jobs, without any manual prompting required.
The architecture separates responsibilities cleanly: Vapi handles telephony infrastructure (phone numbers, inbound and outbound call routing, real-time voice, transcripts, and call logs), while Hermes provides the agentic layer (goals, memory, tool use, proactive scheduling, and outcome verification). Vapi offers up to 10 free US phone numbers per account, and the Hermes setup uses OpenRouter with Claude Opus 4.7 as the underlying model. A live demo shows the agent searching for a Manhattan spa, identifying a target, and completing a 90-second outbound booking call through Vapi at a cost of $0.05.
The video also covers inbound call handling, where Hermes can act as a front-line voice agent for a business using configurable system prompts and assistant personalities built inside the Vapi dashboard. For developers building autonomous agents that need to interact with the physical world through voice, this video provides a concrete, low-cost integration pattern connecting a capable open-source agent framework to production telephony infrastructure—an area where most agentic setups currently stop short.
📺 Source: David Ondrej · Published May 20, 2026
🏷️ Format: Tutorial Demo
