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.