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They are used a lot in audio processing - digital mixers, effect boxes etc. In a digital mixer, you'll need to get 32+ channels of audio encoded into the correct format, mixed, effects added, re-encoded, and back out in under 10ms, hopefully a lot less. The encoders/decoders and the main mix will usually be in a FPGA. The effects will have their own DSPs.

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In my experience FPGAs are broadly used as "glue" chips to interface between microcontrollers, DSPs, codecs, and other hardware elements (encoders, LEDs, etc). Technically these are called CPLDs but depending on how much work they do, they may use a larger family with more logic cells and memory.

Basically if you need to interface with any digital hardware that isn't natively supported by your microcontroller/CPU/DSP, you'll probably want an FPGA to do it unless you have enough resources to write a bit-banged interface in the micro.

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