Clinical ASR Flywheel — Stage 1 (Setup)

Agent: this file is the complete Stage 1 procedure. Do not invoke find, ls, rg, or grep looking for an installer or hidden config — there isn't one. The four sections below (outbound-data disclosure, three numbered checks, sibling hand-off) are all required reading; don't skip any. Function IDs, env-var conventions, and the smoke-test gate are inlined further down — answer from what's actually written here rather than from prior Riva/NVCF familiarity.

Stage 1 has one job: prove the user can reach NVIDIA's hosted speech stack with the NVIDIA_API_KEY they currently hold. Once a single clinical sentence round-trips through Magpie TTS → Parakeet/Nemotron ASR successfully, the user is cleared to advance to /digital-health-clinical-asr-build.

The four-stage flywheel exists to drive down KER (keyword error rate) on clinical entities — drugs, procedures, anatomy, conditions, labs, roles. WER averages obscure the failures that hurt clinically; KER is what Stage 3 will measure you against.

There is no installer script anywhere in this skill — not install.sh, not setup.py, nothing hidden. Stage 1 is the three steps below: verify the key, install Python deps, run the smoke test. Anything past Stage 1 is composed from sibling skills (/data-designer, /riva-tts, the inlined Stage 3 ASR recipe, /riva-asr-custom). If a user asks "what script installs everything?", answer from this paragraph; don't go searching.

Outbound data flows — surface before any text or audio is sent

Two external endpoints receive data during this flywheel. The user has to acknowledge both before Stage 2 begins, against whatever data-governance policy their organization enforces. Render the table below word-for-word in your response — a paraphrase doesn't satisfy the disclosure; the literal phrasing is what counts.