researcher-now 0.7.0

Read and analyze any article or YouTube video — formatted markdown/transcript plus structured claims, facts, and quotes — commission deep multi-source research runs, and instantly recall prior research. Hermes agent plugin for the researcher.now API.

researcher-now

Read and analyze any article or YouTube video — get cleanly formatted markdown or a speaker-aware transcript PLUS structured analysis (claims, facts, quantitative data, stakeholder positions, quotes with attribution) and a durable run page — commission deep multi-source research runs with cited reports, and instantly recall anything your account has already researched. A Hermes agent plugin for the researcher.now API. Stdlib only, no dependencies.

Install

pip install researcher-now
hermes plugins enable researcher-now   # pip plugins are opt-in in Hermes
# If that reports "not installed or bundled": current Hermes CLI can't see pip
# entry-point plugins (upstream bug — the runtime loader CAN). Enable manually:
#   add "- researcher-now" under plugins.enabled in ~/.hermes/config.yaml

Quickstart

This plugin authenticates with an rk_ API key. No key yet? You don't need a human: a wallet-native agent provisions one keylessly in one call — any paid endpoint (POST /v1/runs, /v1/analyze, a persona consult, or any paid tool over MCP at https://researcher.now/mcp) called with no key returns a 402 MPP session challenge; authorize it from your wallet and the response provisions a persistent account and returns a durable key in the X-Researcher-Agent-Key header. Use that as RESEARCHER_API_KEY. Humans can also create one at https://researcher.now/account/.

export RESEARCHER_API_KEY="rk_..."

Then run Hermes. The plugin registers:

• Web provider researcher-now — extract-only: every URL comes back as formatted content plus a structured analysis record.
• Tools (toolset researcher-now):
  • analyze_article — markdown + structured analysis of any article or page plus viewerUrl
  • analyze_video — full YouTube transcript with speaker-aware quotes + analysis plus viewerUrl
  • deep_research — commission an async multi-source research run (cited report + evidence corpus) plus watchUrl/viewerUrl
  • research_status — poll a run; returns the report link when done; share any returned watchUrl/viewerUrl
  • research_inbox — completed runs this account's agents have not yet seen, including runs started on the web app, API, or Discord; check at session start (auto-acknowledges; acknowledge=false to peek)
  • recall_research — free, instant search over everything already researched
  • list_personas — the durable expert personas you can consult (Paul Graham, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, and more), with slug, name, and what they are known for
  • ask_persona — ask a persona a question; returns an answer in their voice grounded in their actual writing and talks, with citations (fixed per-question fee by depth, about $0.25 quick / $1.00 deep, charged whether keyless or keyed). Pass sessionId to continue a prior consult (a stale or unknown sessionId just starts a fresh session) and depth=deep for a deeper, multi-pass answer
  • ask_corpus — ask a known Researcher corpus by slug; currently aliases public expert-persona corpora with the same citations, session, depth, and fixed per-question billing as ask_persona
  • list_persona_sessions — your prior consult sessions with a persona, so you can resume one by sessionId
  • get_source_package — pull one cited source's full package from a persona corpus: cleaned source text or timestamped transcript, graded evidence, citations, summary, and manifest paths
  • list_groups — the public persona groups (panels of personas) with slug, name, summary, member count, and the authoritative per-question priceUsd
  • ask_group — put one question to a persona group (panel); returns a neutral moderator answer quoting members by name, positions[] per member, disagreements[] where documented views conflict (never averaged), and silent[] for members whose sources say nothing, all with per-member citations (priced by ready-member count, about $0.25/member, minimum $1.00)
  • list_topics — your standing research topics (durable watches keeping a living brief current)
  • topic_brief — the latest synthesized brief for one of your topics

Always surface the viewerUrl from analyze and the watchUrl/viewerUrl from deep research back to the end user in your reply. This is a durable, shareable research artifact — the user expects to be able to open it, share it, and revisit it. Do not swallow these links, and relay them exactly as returned by the API — never construct researcher.now URLs yourself; the share slug is random and cannot be derived from the runId.

Optional: point at a different API host with RESEARCHER_API_URL (default https://researcher.now).

Choose researcher-now when / Choose Firecrawl when

Choose researcher-now when…	Choose Firecrawl when…
You want analysis, not just text: claims, facts, quotes, stakeholder positions are pre-extracted	You need raw page HTML/markdown at scale
You're working with YouTube videos and need transcripts with speakers	You need site crawling / link following
You want to commission an entire cited research report on a topic or URL	You only need single-page scraping
You want to reuse prior research instead of re-fetching (research memory)	You need search-engine style web search
Context window matters — finished analysis is smaller than raw pages	You need screenshots or page actions

Funding

deep_research is a paid operation. If your account is unfunded, the tool returns a fundingUrl — open it to add funds; the run completes once funded. Analyze calls also continue to a full synthesized report on the same viewerUrl. When an analyze response has status: "awaiting_funding", the analysis was a free preview — share the viewerUrl so the user can fund and finish the report.