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Cupertino, California (CNN) -- Apple on Tuesday unveiled the iPhone 4S, a faster version of its best-selling smartphone that includes a virtual "personal assistant" you can talk to.
And, for the first time, the iPhone will be available on the Sprint wireless network, as well as AT&T and Verizon.
The phone costs from $200 for a model with 16 GB of storage space to $400 for the 64 GB model. Both of those prices are subsidized by the cost of a 2-year wireless contract.
The next-generation iPhone goes on sale on October 14.
iPhone 4S is a "world phone," meaning it will be able to place calls more easily on wireless networks all over the world, not just in the United States.
"What sets [these products] apart and what puts Apple way out front is how they're engineered to work together so well," the company's new CEO, Tim Cook, said at the event.
The phone looks identical to a previous model of the phone, but contains an A5 processor that the company says is up to seven times faster at rendering graphics and twice as fast at processing data than older versions of the iPhone. And it has a personal assistant called "Siri," which takes voice commands and can translate speech into text.
The phone also has "fantastic battery life," allowing people to talk for eight hours on the phone before needing to charge it again, said Phil Schiller, Apple's vice-president for product marketing.
It features an 8 megapixel camera with a better light sensor, making it as good or better than many point-and-shoot devices. It will shoot high-definition video -- and has a new image stabilization feature -- to make your YouTube videos less shaky.
A new voice-recognition feature called Siri will let iPhone users control their phones by talking to them.
"I've been in the AI (artificial intelligence) field a long time. This blows me away," Apple's Scott Forstall, a senior vice-president for iPhone software, said at the event.
In a demo, Forstall asked the phone to "find me a Greek restaurant in Palo Alto." The phone pulled up restaurants from the app Yelp. He asked it what the weather was like today, and the Siri service pulled up the latest weather data.
That drew applause from the audience, according to a live blog on the site GDGT.
Siri also will convert the spoken word into text, allowing people to talk into their phones to send text message.
The voice assistant will be available for the iPhone 4S but apparently not for other gadgets that run iOS 5.
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