Chat_template is not set & throwing error

🤗Tokenizers
1

When I am running the sample code from here:

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("facebook/blenderbot-400M-distill")

chat = [
   {"role": "user", "content": "Hello, how are you?"},
   {"role": "assistant", "content": "I'm doing great. How can I help you today?"},
   {"role": "user", "content": "I'd like to show off how chat templating works!"},
]

tokenizer.apply_chat_template(chat, tokenize=False)

I get the error message:

ValueError: Cannot use apply_chat_template() because tokenizer.chat_template is not set and no template argument was passed! For information about writing templates and setting the tokenizer.chat_template attribute, please see the documentation at https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/main/en/chat_templating

I am using tokenizers-0.19.1 & transformers-4.44.2 on a ubuntu on windows system.

Any clue what the problem could be? I already uninstalled and re-installed these two packages.
Thank you for your help!!