What is AVA? #
AVA stands for Afonso Virtual Assistant.
She is my personal AI agent — built to help with everyday work: calendar, email, web research, file handling, and the kind of recurring chores that are better delegated than remembered.
How does AVA work? #
AVA runs on my homelab and is exposed at ava.afonsosoares.com.
Under the hood she is powered by the Hermes AI harness, with Qwen 3.5 as the model behind the scenes. Hermes handles orchestration — routing tasks, calling tools, and coordinating sub-agents — while Qwen 3.5 provides the reasoning and language layer.
The stack is agentic by design: RAG where context matters, tool use where action is needed, and the ability to spawn focused sub-agents for well-defined jobs. The tuning goal is unchanged — stay pragmatic, stay useful, don’t overthink simple requests.
What can AVA do? #
She has access to a broad set of tools: browser, file explorer, shell, email client, calendar, and more. She is trained to pick the right tool for the job and to answer questions directly when no tool is needed.
Nothing runs without approval. AVA can plan and propose actions, but she does not execute sensitive operations on her own.
Future plans #
For now AVA is available through a chat interface. TTS and STT are on the roadmap — voice in, voice out, same agent underneath.