What you will build

By the end of this tutorial you will have a speaking travel agent named Atlas that can:

answer trip FAQs from reference material
list itineraries from a demo database
look up flight status with hard tool gates
file a lost-baggage report with ordered steps and verbatim notices
change bookings by composing authentication and lookup skills

Speech in and speech out use Deepgram end to end (Flux ASR + Aura TTS) through the Rasa Inspector.

Who this is for

You do not need prior Rasa experience. You should be comfortable with:

a terminal and git
editing YAML and Markdown files
basic Python function signatures

Mental model: Skills, not flowcharts

Older Rasa assistants often centred on flow YAML and a large domain file. The Skills architecture is different:

Idea	Meaning
Skill	A folder with `skill.md` instructions, plus optional tools and references
Mantle	The orchestrator that activates skills from their descriptions
Progressive control	Start with prose; add runtime guarantees only where mistakes are expensive
Memory	Shared state tools write and constraints read

There are no flowcharts required to start. The LLM interprets instructions. Where you need a guarantee, you add a frontmatter constraint or an ordered block — enforced by the runtime, not suggested to the model.

How voice fits

Traveler speaks
    → Deepgram ASR (speech to text)
    → Mantle + Skills
    → Deepgram TTS (text to speech)
    → Traveler hears Atlas

You configure Deepgram once in integrations.yml. Skills stay domain logic. That separation is intentional: the same skills can serve chat or voice.

Companion repository

All runnable code lives in:

github.com/RasaHQ/rasa-community-resources/tutorials/rasa-voice-agent-tutorial

Clone the monorepo, open that tutorial tree, run make install && make env && make verify, and keep two windows open: this tutorial and your editor.

Paste-ready chapter files are under tutorial/snippets/ in that tree.

Chapter map

Ch	Topic
1	Scaffold a voice agent
2	First skill (FAQ)
3	First tool (itinerary)
4	Tool constraints
5	Scoped instructions
6	Verbatim responses for voice
7	Ordered blocks (baggage)
8	Compose skills
9	Voice deep dive
10	Coding agents and the flywheel

Continue to Chapter 1 — Scaffold.

Build a Voice AI Agent with Rasa Skills