Skills catalog: 70+ built-in Arka commands

Browse Arka’s 70+ built-in skills for media, web search, PDF RAG, Google Workspace, charts, stocks, YouTube, voice, and developer automation — plus enable, disable, and create custom skills.

Arka ships 70+ built-in skills. Describe what you want in plain English and the router picks the right skill — offline symbolic rules first, LLM fallback when needed. Run arka help to list skills available on your platform.

Chat & web

Web Q&A, calc, weather

Memory

Remember and recall facts

PDF RAG

Ingest and query PDFs

Charts

Line, bar, pie, scatter plots

Vision

Images and blueprints

YouTube

Research and download

Google

Gmail and Calendar

Stocks

Market intelligence

Voice

Wake word and TTS

Goal agent

Multi-step automation

Life sciences

PubMed, genomics, bioinformatics

Plugins

Third-party skills

CLI

Full command reference

Route learn

Teach phrase → skill

MCP

Cursor and external servers

Repo health

Lint and test checks

Web and chat

Skill	Example
web_answer	arka ask who won IPL 2025
deep_web_answer	arka /latest AI regulation news
search_web	arka search rust async tutorials
calc	arka calc 2^10 + sqrt(144)
hyperlocal_weather	arka weather near me

Media and documents

Skill	Example
compose_video	arka compose a video about climate change
compose_slides	arka make slides about climate change
compose_3d	arka create a 3d model of a gear
pdf_ingest	pdf_ingest ~/Documents/resume.pdf
pdf_ask	pdf_ask --doc resume.pdf "summarize skills"
youtube_research	arka youtube research "python asyncio tutorial"

Developer tools

Skill	Example
git_summary	arka git summary
lint_python	arka lint this file
github_repo	arka github repo stats for arka-agent/arka
goal	arka goal set up venv and run pytest
repo_health	arka repo health .

Finance

Skill	Example
stock	arka stock analyze AAPL
currency_convert	arka convert 100 USD to INR
kalshi	kalshi search bitcoin
price_check	arka price check iPhone 16

Run arka help to see every skill in your install. The list varies by platform mode (full vs portable) and installed extras such as [voice] or [pdf].

Managing skills

Enable or disable skills without editing configuration files:

arka skills list
arka skills disable compose_video
arka skills enable compose_video

Disabled skills remain visible to routing and capability discovery, but execution is blocked with an explicit enable command. Preferences are stored in Arka’s user configuration under skills.json.

Create a custom skill

arka skill new api_checker --template dev --guided

The wizard asks for a description and natural-language triggers, then creates skill.json, run.py, README.md, and TEST_PLAN.md. It checks existing manifests for duplicate triggers and suggests non-colliding phrases.