telephony

telephony is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from NousResearch/hermes-agent. It costs 17 tokens per session (3,113 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A collection of phone capabilities built around Twilio, including phone numbers, text messages, and outbound calls.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps buy and remember a Twilio number, send SMS or MMS, check incoming texts, make calls, and place outbound AI calls through supported providers.
Why use it?
It handles common phone tasks without adding telephony tools to the core agent setup.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

About the project

Hermes Agent is an AI assistant that learns from its use by creating and improving skills, retaining knowledge, searching past conversations, and adapting to its users. It is for people who want to run an agent through a terminal or messaging platforms while connecting it to different AI models and scheduled tasks.

NousResearch/hermes-agent · 241,505 stars · on GitHub · hermes-agent.nousresearch.com

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/telephony
Any agent
npx skills add NousResearch/hermes-agent --skill telephony
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for telephony

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/telephony.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/telephony)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/telephony"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/telephony.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 17 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,113 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00017 $0.03113
Opus 5 $0.00009 $0.01556
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00623
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00311

Measured 2d ago against content hash 41ec6380adce, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

telephony scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/telephony.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

8 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

optional-skills/productivity/telephony/SKILL.md · 419 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 419 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Telephony — Numbers, Calls, and Texts without Core Tool Changes

This optional skill gives Hermes practical phone capabilities while keeping telephony out of the core tool list.

It ships with a helper script, scripts/telephony.py, that can:

  • save provider credentials into ${HERMES_HOME:-~/.hermes}/.env
  • search for and buy a Twilio phone number
  • remember that owned number for later sessions
  • send SMS / MMS from the owned number
  • poll inbound SMS for that number with no webhook server required
  • make direct Twilio calls using TwiML <Say> or <Play>
  • import the owned Twilio number into Vapi
  • place outbound AI calls through Bland.ai or Vapi

What this solves

This skill is meant to cover the practical phone tasks users actually want:

  • outbound calls
  • texting
  • owning a reusable agent number
  • checking messages that arrive to that number later
  • preserving that number and related IDs between sessions
  • future-friendly telephony identity for inbound SMS polling and other automations

It does not turn Hermes into a real-time inbound phone gateway. Inbound SMS is handled by polling the Twilio REST API. That is enough for many workflows, including notifications and some one-time-code retrieval, without adding core webhook infrastructure.

Safety rules — mandatory

  1. Always confirm before placing a call or sending a text.
  2. Never dial emergency numbers.
  3. Never use telephony for harassment, spam, impersonation, or anything illegal.
  4. Treat third-party phone numbers as sensitive operational data:
    • do not save them to Hermes memory
    • do not include them in skill docs, summaries, or follow-up notes unless the user explicitly wants that
  5. It is fine to persist the agent-owned Twilio number because that is part of the user's configuration.
  6. VoIP numbers are not guaranteed to work for all third-party 2FA flows. Use with caution and set user expectations clearly.

Decision tree — which service to use?

Use this logic instead of hardcoded provider routing:

Read the full file on GitHub · 419 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 419 lines · 17 tokens per session scan A 41ec6380adce

Subscribe to this mod's changes

telephony is a skill published in the GitHub repository NousResearch/hermes-agent (241,505 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 17 tokens to every session and 3,113 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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