diff --git a/nemo/collections/common/tokenizers/huggingface/auto_tokenizer.py b/nemo/collections/common/tokenizers/huggingface/auto_tokenizer.py
index 756bce55f1c6..d4b4d077176e 100644
--- a/nemo/collections/common/tokenizers/huggingface/auto_tokenizer.py
+++ b/nemo/collections/common/tokenizers/huggingface/auto_tokenizer.py
@@ -312,6 +312,10 @@ def text_to_ids(self, text):
         ids = self.tokens_to_ids(tokens)
         return ids
 
+    def apply_chat_template(self, *args, **kwargs):
+        """Appies chat template and tokenizes results"""
+        return self.tokenizer.apply_chat_template(*args, **kwargs)
+
     def ids_to_text(self, ids, remove_special_tokens=True):
         """
         Converts token IDs back to text.
diff --git a/nemo/collections/common/tokenizers/tokenizer_spec.py b/nemo/collections/common/tokenizers/tokenizer_spec.py
index f6e905d75c3b..4d30f4c1c183 100644
--- a/nemo/collections/common/tokenizers/tokenizer_spec.py
+++ b/nemo/collections/common/tokenizers/tokenizer_spec.py
@@ -26,33 +26,45 @@ class TokenizerSpec(ABC):
 
     @abstractmethod
     def text_to_tokens(self, text):
+        """Converts text into a list of tokens."""
         pass
 
     @abstractmethod
     def tokens_to_text(self, tokens):
+        """Converts a list of tokens back into text."""
         pass
 
     @abstractmethod
     def tokens_to_ids(self, tokens):
+        """Converts a list of tokens to their corresponding IDs."""
         pass
 
     @abstractmethod
     def ids_to_tokens(self, ids):
+        """Converts a list of token IDs back to tokens."""
         pass
 
     @abstractmethod
     def text_to_ids(self, text):
+        """Converts text directly to token IDs."""
         pass
 
     @abstractmethod
     def ids_to_text(self, ids):
+        """Converts token IDs back to text."""
         pass
 
     def add_special_tokens(self, special_tokens: List[str]):
+        """Adds special tokens (eos, pad, cls...) to vocab."""
+        raise NotImplementedError("To be implemented")
+
+    def apply_chat_template(self, *args, **kwargs):
+        """Appies chat template and tokenizes results"""
         raise NotImplementedError("To be implemented")
 
     @property
     def name(self):
+        """name of the class"""
         return type(self).__name__
 
     @property
diff --git a/tests/collections/common/test_apply_chat_template.py b/tests/collections/common/test_apply_chat_template.py
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..ce27c5c824f4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/tests/collections/common/test_apply_chat_template.py
@@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
+# Copyright (c) 2020, NVIDIA CORPORATION.  All rights reserved.
+#
+# Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
+# you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
+# You may obtain a copy of the License at
+#
+#     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
+#
+# Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
+# distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
+# WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
+# See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
+# limitations under the License.
+
+import pytest
+from nemo.collections.nlp.modules.common.tokenizer_utils import get_tokenizer
+
+
+def test_chat_template():
+    transformers = pytest.importorskip("transformers")
+    path = "/home/TestData/akoumparouli/tokenizer_with_chat_template/"
+    tokenizers = [get_tokenizer(path), transformers.AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(path)]
+    prompt = "Give me a short introduction to pytest."
+    messages = [{"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful CI assistant."}, {"role": "user", "content": prompt}]
+    texts = [
+        tokenizer.apply_chat_template(messages, tokenize=False, add_generation_prompt=True) for tokenizer in tokenizers
+    ]
+    assert texts[0] == texts[1]
+
+
+def test_throws_chat_template():
+    path = "/home/TestData/akoumparouli/tokenizer_without_chat_template/"
+    tokenizer = get_tokenizer(path)
+    prompt = "Give me a short introduction to pytest."
+    messages = [{"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful CI assistant."}, {"role": "user", "content": prompt}]
+    try:
+        tokenizer.apply_chat_template(messages, tokenize=False, add_generation_prompt=True)
+    except ValueError as e:
+        assert 'Cannot use chat template functions because tokenizer.chat_template is not set' in str(e)