Watching a local AI voice assistant get dumber (A 9B to 0.8B agent experiment on my RTX 5060 Ti)

An experiment was conducted to evaluate the performance degradation of a local AI voice assistant using varying model sizes from Qwen 3.5, specifically 9B, 4B, 2B, and 0.8B, on an RTX 5060 Ti with 16GB VRAM. The results indicated that while smaller models improved response speed, they significantly lost agentic reasoning capabilities: the 9B model effectively handled tool orchestration, while the 0.8B model failed to operate correctly, illustrating a critical drop in performance and contextual understanding. This study highlights the importance of model size in maintaining functionality for voice assistant applications, emphasizing the trade-offs between speed and capability in consumer hardware deployments.