Can a Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB) run a small local LLM reliably for a voice assistant project?

I’m building a physical BMO-style AI assistant (from Adventure Time) on a Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB). The assistant has:

• a pygame animated face that reacts to speech
• wake-word listening
• conversation memory (JSON-based)
• a state system (sleep / idle / thinking / talking)
• plans to later connect ESP32 modules to control room devices

Everything works on desktop right now. I’m trying to move the AI part fully onto the Pi.

Currently I’m testing with:

ollama llama3.2:1b

but I was told this model may be too heavy for reliable performance on a Pi 4. Smaller models I tried work but become noticeably worse (hallucinate more or stop following instructions).

So my questions are:

1. Is a Pi 4 (8GB) realistically capable of running llama3.2:1b for a small assistant like this?
2. Are there better lightweight Ollama-compatible models for this use case?
3. Has anyone successfully run a voice assistant with local inference only on a Pi 4?

If anyone has experience with this and can help me please do! I've spent alot of time on this and i really dont want it all to go to waste.