Red Hat Summit Red Hat SummitSupportConsoleDevelopersStart a trialContact

Chapter 1. About tool calling

Tool calling extends model functionality beyond text generation, allowing it to perform actions such as querying databases, calling APIs, executing calculations, or retrieving real-time information.

Red Hat AI Inference Server provides comprehensive support for tool calling through the upstream vLLM project. With tool calling, the language model can understand when it needs to call an external tool and select the appropriate tool based on the context. The model generates properly formatted tool call requests and integrates the tool response back into the conversation flow.

Tool calling provides several advantages for building intelligent applications with Red Hat AI Inference Server:

  • Provides access to real-time information beyond the model training data
  • Enables the model to perform precise calculations and data processing
  • Integrates with existing APIs and services
  • Enhances reliability through structured function calls
  • Separates reasoning and execution
Red Hat logoGithubredditYoutubeTwitter

Learn

Try, buy, & sell

Communities

About Red Hat Documentation

We help Red Hat users innovate and achieve their goals with our products and services with content they can trust. Explore our recent updates.

Making open source more inclusive

Red Hat is committed to replacing problematic language in our code, documentation, and web properties. For more details, see the Red Hat Blog.

About Red Hat

We deliver hardened solutions that make it easier for enterprises to work across platforms and environments, from the core datacenter to the network edge.

Theme

© 2026 Red HatBack to top