4 Feb 2026: Agent Skills

Ricardo Updated by Ricardo

AI Agents have quickly become one of our favourite ways of building in Turn.io. After giving them memory, the ability to branch to another agent or journey when they detect an intent, the ability to collect data, passing the user's profile, we're giving them a fantastic new skill...

Agent Skills: give your agents the power to act

So far, Agents were really good at having a back and forth conversation, helping users with questions their had, or helping them accomplishing a goal.

But it was hard whenever the Agent required some external information (for example, checking a doctor's calendar for available timeslots), or performing an action (for example, booking an appointment).

To solve this problem, we built Skills. There are 2 types of skills:

💡 Knowledge skills

Instead of having one big prompt with everything your Agent needs to know, which makes it expensive and slow, you can now break its knowledge into smaller chunks. Each chunk is a Knowledge Skill.

Then, when the Agent needs that information, it retrieves it. Internally, the Agent keeps a "table of contents" of everything it knows, only accessing knowledge when it needs.

This makes generations much cheaper and faster!

Skills are reusable across different Agents, so you can also easily reuse knowledge across Agents.

⚡️ Function Skills

If you're familiar with function calling, you'll be at home with Function Skills. They give your Agents capabilities of executing custom code to enrich their conversations.

Want it to autonomously book an appointment into your system? Or retrieve a list of doctors and their availabilities? Or get the current weather? Simply build a Function Skill for your Agent, and they'll autonomously use it whenever they need them

How to build Function Skills?

Function skills are built using the Lua programming language and the Turn SDK. Here are in-depth developer docs.

Not a developer? No problem. LLMs are extremely capable of generating Lua code. We've created a Claude Skill that allows you to just ask Claude to generate skills.

As with Knowledge Skills, Function Skills are also shared across Agents, helping you also manage shared knowledge and capabilities. Write once, use multiple times.

Want to learn more about Agents and all their capabilities? Learn more »

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