NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB vs Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB

A small cousin for voice and device assistants, game characters and robot interfaces, trained for multi-turn tool calls, instruction hierarchy and short spoken replies, with thinking switchable per request. NVIDIA's Q4_K_M GGUF needs about 8 GB, and Ollama and LM Studio carry it. Context is 64K, half the Gemma 4 base, and NVIDIA publishes no safety results.

Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct

An omni-modal cousin that listens, watches and reads, then answers in text or one of three voices, with tool calls from spoken requests, under plain Apache 2.0. Its only build, BF16, needs about 85 GB, and speech out needs Transformers or vLLM-Omni. The main risk is no answers from Qwen and no safety work for speech-driven actions.

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB

1. Quickest start is ollama run nemotron-3.5-bolt:e4b, about 8 GB of files, and set num_ctx to 65536 or less, since NVIDIA supports 64K
2. With NVIDIA's GGUF use llama-server -m Nemotron-3.5-Bolt-E4B-Q4_K_M.gguf -c 65536 -ngl 999 --jinja, and add --reasoning on --reasoning-budget <tokens> to cap thinking
3. With vLLM 0.31.0 or later pass --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser gemma4 --reasoning-parser gemma4 and the repository's chat_template.jinja
4. Pass enable_thinking explicitly in chat_template_kwargs, since the template defaults to off whatever the card says, and set skip_special_tokens false as the card's examples do
5. Use temperature=1.0 and top_p=0.95 in both modes, as the card says
6. Set conversational_mode true for spoken replies, which appends a brevity instruction to the system prompt
7. Answer a slow tool at once with a pending tool message, then send the result later as a user message starting TOOL RESULT, as the card's asynchronous pattern says
8. Keep persistent rules in the system prompt and send state updates as separate user or system messages in order, per the card's prompting guidelines

Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct

1. For text answers, mkdir -p media && vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct --dtype bfloat16 --max-model-len 32768 --allowed-local-media-path "$(pwd)/media" with vLLM 0.11.1 or later serves the Thinker on an OpenAI-compatible API
2. The card's command passes --allowed-local-media-path /, which lets anyone who can reach the server have it read any file on the machine through a file:// URL. Point it at a dedicated folder that holds only the media you mean to send, as above, and give vLLM an absolute path
3. Send audio as audio_url and images as image_url content parts; vLLM serve doesn't take use_audio_in_video, so pass a video's audio separately
4. For speech out, load Qwen3OmniMoeForConditionalGeneration in Transformers 4.57.0 or later with qwen-omni-utils, pick speaker Ethan, Chelsie or Aiden, and write the returned waveform at 24 kHz
5. Call model.disable_talker() or pass return_audio=False when you only need text, which saves about 10 GB and time
6. Parse tool calls as JSON inside <tool_call> tags yourself, since no parser is named, and confirm actions triggered by speech before running them
7. Keep use_audio_in_video the same across every step of a conversation, the card warns results go wrong otherwise
8. Budget memory for video, the card's table rises from 78.85 GB for 15 seconds to 144.81 GB for 120 seconds in BF16