I follow Mistral AI and especially liked their voice Model voxtral, which is supposed to be better than whisper. So while the LLM can maybe not compete, they do compete in voice. [1]

I think these kind of special use cases matter a lot for people who want to build special software. Voice for example is not yet that uniformly accessible as LLMs. So once you chose one provider you're more tighty coupled. Plus, handling voice is more sensitive by nature, so guess at least for European companies building something with voice, Mistral is the go-to company now.

Also, running voxtral yourself is not that straight forward as of now, so relying on their inference makes sense.

1: https://mistral.ai/news/voxtral